She should know. She’d spent more than a few hours staring at the stone from Mexico.
“What is this?” Shay inquired, trying to keep her burning curiosity out of her voice. Having an information advantage over Smite-Williams was rare.
“You don’t need to know, Miz Carson. You just need to recover the artifact. I’ll send you information on the likely location when you agree to take the job.”
“Bullshit,” Shay hissed.
The Professor blinked, taken off guard by her sudden vehemence. “Excuse me?”
“I need to know about the stone,” Shay insisted.
“I’m surprised by your reaction. I can assure you that in its current form the artifact is not dangerous at all, if that’s what you’re worried about. I don’t understand your concern otherwise.”
“I need to know what’s going on with this one,” Shay demanded. “I have my reasons.”
“No, Miz Carson, I don’t think you need to know more than what I’m offering.” The Professor pushed his beer to the side. “I understand you need all relevant information, but I can guarantee you there won’t be any problems or tricks if you recover this stone. It won’t explode. You won’t have to keep it in any sort of special container or use dampening magic. You just have to swim into the lake, enter the caves, find the artifact, and bring it to me. It’s just a stone with symbols as far as this job is concerned.”
“Let’s cut the crap.” Shay leaned forward and shook her head. “They’re not just symbols. They are symbols that might be extraterrestrial in origin, and I’m not talking about Oriceran. Everything we thought we knew once the truth of Oriceran came out might be just as wrong as what people believed twenty years ago.”
The tomb raider couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen true surprise from Smite-Williams. The man stared at her wide-eyed for several seconds before gulping down the rest of his beer.
“While not admitting anything else,” the Professor began, “I’ll note that you are surprisingly well-informed about this particular stone. I didn’t anticipate this scenario.”
Shay sighed. “I came across some information related to these symbols. I’ve looked into it as deeply as I can, and everything I can find points to it being from some other planet, not Earth or Oriceran.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to read the symbols yet, but some of them match. There’s no fucking way this other stone isn’t related to it.”
“I see.” The Professor scratched his eyebrow. “That revelation changes a few things.”
“Does it now?”
“Aye. I have to contact a few people.”
Shay frowned. “So, I’m off the job.”
“I didn’t say that. If anything, your knowledge makes you the superior choice for this. I’ll get back to you soon.”
Shay chuckled. “I just realized something. You didn’t know, did you?”
The Professor shot her a smile. “As I said, I’ll get back to you, but I’d ask that you stay in town, so I can get a hold of you.”
“Just don’t take too long.”
“Oh, trust me, I’m not planning to.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Peyton whistled while Osiris slept on his lap. Lily was up but rooting around in the refrigerator. His panic over his brother had subsided. Now he wasn’t afraid. He was filled with contempt.
Shay was right. Peyton was far better than whatever lame mercenary hackers Randy had hired. It was almost too easy to redirect their searches and cover his tracks.
The key strategy to hacking was not to be discovered. That way you could take your time manipulating the target system. If they’d been halfway decent he wouldn’t have even known they were looking for him, and now they didn’t have a chance.
With all that taken care of, Peyton had more time to look into Shay’s allegedly alien symbols. He clicked his mouse on a window to inspect the results from his custom dark web bots. He doubted just searching the surface net was going to reveal anything Shay didn’t already know.
For all her bristly killer persona he’d seen some of the woman underneath, the history-obsessed tomb raider with a vast library. Peyton was good at research, but Shay was damned good too.
His bots had been crawling around the web seeking out information that might be of help, but he’d barely had time to look at their results. The best computer program in the world was still useless without some human curation in the end.
If there really were aliens who had nothing to do with Oriceran, it only followed that people might have spent as much time trying to cover up the truth of their existence as they had magic. Access to advanced alien technology and magic would be the perfect tools for conspirators.
The only reason Peyton had hope was that people—whether from Oriceran or Earth—tended to make some small mistake in the end. It was one of the reasons hackers still relied heavily on tricking people out of information before they even worried about getting behind a keyboard.
“What do we have here? Something good?” Peyton murmured to himself.
He scanned the search results from the bots. Their algorithms focused on locating dark web pages related to non-Oriceran alien languages and linguistics, with exclusions for certain famous fictional alien languages. Most of the hits were garbage from troll sites or raving conspiracy nuts, but one result caught his eye.
PROJECT NEPHILIM SUMMARY AND BUDGETARY ALLOTMENTS.
Peyton chewed on his lip. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound ominous. Let’s see where you’re coming from, Project Nephilim.”
He typed in a few commands. “Department of Defense server, huh? Why am I not surprised? Of course it is.”
Peyton worked his jaw for a moment. Poking around in a DOD server might bring some heat…but only if he got caught. The spider had already port-scanned for him. For a military server, they had a lot of holes.
I should write my congressman to complain about this sad display.
He spent the next few minutes digging into the Project Nephilim server while making sure to cover his tracks and maintain a healthy number of proxy servers
