“You hungry, boy?”
He shuffled after me, stiff from being curled up for so long. I walked a couple of steps, and then stopped to wait for him.
“Come on, Cas. I’m pretty sure we’ll find something in the caf.”
As he came alongside, I rested my hand on his head, and scratched him behind the ears. This time, he leant against me.
“Sook,” I said, and he straightened up and shook his head. “Let’s get dinner.”
This time, when I moved off, he walked more easily, and then he broke away, and headed for a corner in the hangar. I guessed everyone had to go sometime. I waited until he came back over, before going through the hangar airlock and into the ship proper. By the time we reached the caf, Abby had woken up more of the crew. Everyone was fumbling their way around the pantry and the cooking gear, and I sighed.
“Abby, you got any kitchen staff cycling out of stasis?”
She tutted.
“You humans and your need for food.”
“Abs, please.”
“Fine, but you’ll have to fend for yourselves for this meal. I want everyone at their stations inside the next twenty.”
She said that last bit over the intercoms, and the folk around me sighed. I sighed, too, and then I slid behind the counter and across to the stoves. I knew how to cook. Hadn’t done it in a while, and I’d never done it for this many, but I figured…
“Anyone else know how to flip a pancake without burning it?”
I got two more volunteers who could operate a mixer and premade batter, two others who knew enough to cook a pancake, and three more who understood the kaff maker enough to get it going. Between us, we had hot food cooked and people moving out the door in fifteen. Mind you, we had barely sat down to eat, ourselves, when Abby spoke again.
“And why aren’t you at your stations?”
I glared in the direction of the intercom and waved my crew of volunteers to sit themselves back down.
“Because we got everyone else fed and out the door early,” I told her. “We need another fifteen so we can eat and clear up. Okay by you?”
And my tone made it very clear that it had better be.
“Fine. We’ll do a briefing at shift change, so everyone awake knows what’s going on.”
“Did you wake a med team?” I asked. “We need one on stand-by, and Doc is gonna want to spruce up his med centre.”
“I’ll do that, now. Shall I send them to you for feeding?”
I exchanged looks with my team of seven.
“I need two of you to stay back and look after Doc and his people. Can any of you be spared?”
It took a little time on their implants, but we negotiated an extra half hour with their crew bosses, and Doc and his folk got fed, as did the incoming kitchen crew. I stayed and helped with the clean-up while the kitchen crew finished waking, and then I headed for the Shady’s research centre.
Someone, somewhere, had to have advertised that contract—and I needed to find out where and who.
Abby worked her way through the Shady’s systems, checking them over, and making sure they didn’t need maintenance scheduled. The verdict was soon, but not yet. We’d have time to get the Shady Marie to shelter, and a repair shop.
“How much time, Abby? And how much will it cost?”
“I’ll talk to Engineering and Bio, and look into it.”
She went, and I headed into the recreation centre, and then stopped.
“Abby?” I said, coming back out. “You won’t be able to reach me in here. It’s isolated and buffered.”
“I’ll send someone,” and she went back to whatever she’d been doing when I’d interrupted.
The recreation centre was exactly as I remembered it. This time, I walked past the simulators, and went into the one cubicle that would let me into the dark web. As I logged into it, I laid down extra defenses in the implant, and hoped the wolves hadn’t hidden themselves a back door. Tens hadn’t had a lot of time to check since I’d come out of stasis.
He’d recalibrated, wiped and reloaded, but there were ways, and they’d had time. I marked down a thorough check-up, or total replacement as something I’d have to get done in the future. By the time I was sure I’d done everything I could do to keep intruders out of my head, the terminal was waiting.
“Well, here goes.”
I went straight into the Underweb, laying a false trail before I surfaced from it to check the official expanse of net. It wasn’t hard to find where the wolf servers were, but getting into them was an entirely different matter. They were well-defended, sure, but that wasn’t the main problem. Most of those protections I’d covered in retrieval training… most. I made another note to go back and study the new ones.
What made the defenses particularly hard to penetrate was the language. Just like the vespis and arach, the wolves used their own tongue to code in. I could understand some of it, but not all. Dammit. Since when had no one made a computer equivalent to Galbas?
I needed to find the wolf terms for ‘Shady Marie’ and ‘Mackenzie Star’… and maybe work backwards from there—and that’s when I struck gold.
The wolves’ client hadn’t been a wolf. In searching for the translation, I came across a communication that linked a Shadow Wolf contact point with both words. That sucker was in Galbas. Fan-fucking-tastic! With nothing better to do, I back-tracked it to one of the most well-armed firewalls I’d ever seen.
The message had bounced through several systems, some of which had better protections than others, but none of which provided a real challenge… and then I hit the wall. Literally. A firewall like none I remembered seeing before it, despite a vague sense of familiarity. There was no way I was going to bull my way through that without taking
