The cowboy acted like he wanted to be the one, but Molly was going to ask Piper. Piper could tell. Whenever Molly had a hard thing to ask, she always hugged her elbows, did this wince that stretched out her bottom lip.
That bottom lip could've caught rain from the sky now.
Piper answered the question before it got asked.
"I'll go," she said.
She didn't need to be a hero or show off her hacking chops. She just wanted control.
When her brother Marcus had gotten caught up in crap he shouldn't have, that Harvest Earth cereal-filler scheme (which felt like a decade ago), the end snuck up on him. He had no control—Sampson sold him out to the health inspectors. They threw his ass in jail. His ass was still in jail—so stupid after all the crime that'd been committed the last two years.
Piper didn't know which way this ending would tip, but she wanted a role. The biggest available.
The cowboy and the aging playboy looked at the ominous signs about the Great Safe, then at each other.
Playboy Quaid said, "I like her odds better than ours."
The cowboy didn't trust Piper, she knew. He probably didn't trust people he saw jaywalking.
But he did step aside.
Piper twisted a pressurized hatch and entered.
The Great Safe was cold in every way a place can be cold. The chamber sprawled from its door like some nautilus or cornucopia, growing, spiraling, with little split-off areas full of weird gadgets or diagrams.
The walls were limestone like the rest of the Roche Rivard bowels, but the floor was smooth and translucent and had green-gold circuits humming just below the surface, with orange-pulsing coils that weaved throughout. Some kinda supercooling probably.
Piper walked a few steps in and just stared.
One split-off area had six inches of blue frost covering its walls. Another smelled sharp and wet like worms. A third, a tunnel Piper couldn't see the end of, gave off high-intensity vibrations that Piper experienced as the first tremors of an earthquake in her own heart.
She lost herself for a sec, then swept all the Doctor Evil jazz from her mind and looked around for a computer.
The moment she wanted it, there it was. Floating in midair: a screen, a bad-ass rig, a pair of long gloves that must've been part of a virtual reality interface. All right in front of Piper's face.
They're in my brain. The room's responding to brain waves.
A message flashed across the phantom screen: POUR VOUS CONNECTER, PLACEZ N'IMPORTE QUELLE PEAU CONTRE LA SURFACE.
Piper didn't know what this meant, but the pad that appeared next had a stick-figure diagram of a person placing their finger, tongue, or kneecap against it.
Must be a biometric reader. She'd heard about sensors that slough off cells to compare against a security database. Usually DNA.
Man. You'd think piranha-infested waters, Frankenstein plants, nanoblades, and baby black holes would be enough security.
The reader glowed impatiently. How long before it timed out? Before it decided you weren't authorized and...what, started an avalanche?
Piper clutched the air in front of her, trying to figure how to beat the security. As she was looking her clawed hands, she had an idea.
Fingernails!
Outside the oubliette, she'd gripped Leathersby's arm with her left hand, hadn't she? Now she scraped underneath the nails of that hand, scooping all the skin cells into a tiny nasty ball and smearing it across the reader.
In a blip, Blake Leathersby's cocky face appeared onscreen.
ACCESS CONFIRMED.
The long gloves floated forward suggestively. Piper slipped her arms inside.
Quickly she was navigating Rivard's master directories, swiping and tapping and thumb-twitching, cruising through every project the French multinational had cooking.
She found designs for an antimatter-fueled spaceship. For invisibility wands. One sprawling diagram was labeled Beyond Airborne: The Awesome Potential of Radio-Viral Pathogen Transmission.
There was enough here to keep you up worrying for the rest of your life, but Piper couldn't sweat it now. She needed the kernel.
She swam through servers and files and directories and sub-directories.
Suddenly the screen flashed bright red. The text turned white.
ALERTE! ATTACK ENTRANTE, 500 KILOMÈTRES.
Then it popped up a radar map of Northern Europe. Roche Rivard was the black star in the middle. A blinking airplane symbol was approaching steadily. It had another symbol moving with it, just above. The nuclear icon.
That couldn't be good.
Piper got rid of the alert and kept looking for the kernel sourcecode. She found a bunch of directories for Yves Pomeroy's Enterprise Software group. One had a folder called CyberParle, which she remembered Molly talking about after that secret trip where she posed as a CIO.
Piper drilled deeper into this folder. The file names were getting strange, full of letter-number juxtaposes and nonsense punctuation. Piper started clicking the bigger ones and spot-checking their text contents, seeing if any looked familiar, if any resembled that beast she'd been mangling data with for the last eighteen months...
Wham!
The filename was total gobbledygook: !?ePP3;Q__&7T. But this was it. Piper followed the logic, squinting at the code, nodding along, rubbing her fingers in their gloves without being aware of it.
The algorithm slipped in, corrupted the data, then slipped out—covering its tracks as it backpedaled.
The kernel.
Slick, simple, efficient. A deadly-gorgeous piece of programming.
Piper took her bluetooth keychain drive from her pocket. The Rivard mainframe immediately connected and made it available to receive files on-screen.
Piper swiped !?ePP3;Q__&7T to the drive, pocketed it, and backed her hands out of the gloves. Another ALERTE! flashed to the screen, but Piper didn't read. She whirled to go and the computer vanished like smoke into a vacuum.
She took a last look back over her shoulder at the Satan's workshop of goodies, then gripped the hatch to the pressurized door with both hands. She heaved clockwise and pulled.
The first person Piper saw, standing outside in the limestone hall, was the cowboy. His sandpaper face looked sorry.
The second person she saw was Blake Leathersby—poking his gun in Durwood's back.
"Didj'a bring me a present?" The British pig pointed to the drive in Piper's hand. "Now that wasn't necessary, lass. But I'll take it just the same."
YOU ARE READING
Anarchy of the Mice
Adventure"Nibble, nibble. Until the whole sick scam rots through." When anarchist-hackers the Blind Mice begin crippling the country's worst corporations -- the "Despicable Dozen" -- with web and software attacks, the public yawns. When they blip the power g...
