CHAPTER 18
Travis looked almost identical to the day Tartarus had gone down. That made a lot of sense, given that happened on Wednesday, and it was now Saturday. Three days didn’t change a man.
He had lost the ill-fitting suit, however. The gray and blue baggy clothes weren’t much of an improvement. If he’d been wearing a helmet, the Archangels had tossed it aside.
“Nick? What the fuck are you doing here?” Travis asked. Then his eyes narrowed. “You aren’t cuffed.”
Standing over his former colleague wouldn’t help, so Nick slumped on the floor by the door. He then spread his hands.
Vague. Rie had told him to be vague. That seemed easy enough, given how little Nick knew.
“Obviously not,” he said. “I’m looking for Helena. I know you sabotaged Tartarus to help them grab her.”
“How did you walk in here with all the damned police dolls locking down the building?” Well, it turned out Travis wasn’t that dumb. “You vanished after Tartarus. I even asked if you got popped in the smash-and-grab, but they said nobody was there.”
It took every ounce of Nick’s willpower to not react.
Travis knew the people who had raided Tartarus directly. He was a fucking gold mine!
“Like I said, I’m here to ask about Helena. You know I have history with her. That makes me the best person to find her, as she seems to have gone missing,” Nick said, sticking to his idea of vague but on message. “And you seem to be the only real Cipher here.”
“Missing… The whole point of a smash-and-grab is to steal something, Nick. Of course she’s not in Tartarus.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “Not from Tartarus. She’s not where she’s supposed to be. Nobody’s happy about that. I suspect you aren’t, either.”
He was swinging for the fences here, but Travis was playing hard to get. Something about this entire setup bothered Nick, however.
Why would somebody fund the NLF to this extent just for the bomb threats? There were far cheaper and easier ways to cover up a raid.
The timeline also didn’t add up.
The hardware for the NLF and those foreign goods had been secured at roughly the same time, through the same company. And Rie seemed to think not all of that hardware was accounted for.
There had to be another operation. Either Travis might give away that Helena was there, or that the reason the NLF had visited the docks was because they were double-crossed.
Nearly a minute passed in silence while Travis simply stared at him, visibly chewing on his thoughts.
Finally, Travis said, “Where do you think she’s supposed to be?”
Ah, shit. Nick hid his frustration with years of experience dealing with annoying managers.
Maybe he should have let Chloe properly investigate those servers. If he was wrong…
Think, dammit, he told himself.
There hadn’t been any signs of preparation for a major expansion in hardware outside. No huge power cables, nor the proper mounting hardware for a mainframe.
“Not here, obviously. But that setup out there was for her,” Nick said. “I know it well enough. Makes me realize you probably knew a lot more about Neural Spike than you let on. But like I said, I’m here to find her. Helena is useless to both of us if you don’t tell me where she’s actually gone.”
Travis nodded slowly. “How’d you get past the police dolls?”
Nick wanted to fake a laugh, but didn’t really have the acting chops. He settled for a shrug. “I walked away from Neural Spike and Tartarus. Do the math.”
“Could be a plant.”
“Could be.”
Travis snorted. “Like I’d believe that. Nobody gave a shit about Tartarus, but you’re the only person who understands the value of Helena. If the military or police knew, they would never have let us get close. I’m guessing our patron made you a deal after his foreign mercs stabbed us all in the back?”
Things had just gotten really juicy. Nick knew he’d fuck this up, soon, but wanted to get as much as he could.
“I made a deal, but never met him. Like with the factories, it was all through false identities.” Alright, so now Nick was just flat-out making shit up and hoping it stuck.
“You noticed that as well? Lotta idiots think the fucking CEO of RTM Strategic is trying to bring down the Spires himself.” Travis rolled his eyes. “Nah. I spoke with him once, over the Altnet. He’s doing this because of how fucked up things got after the riots. He’s a man who understands how rotten everything is to the core, not some rich asshole. A drive like that can’t be faked. The fuck did he even send you here?”
A flare of doubt flickered within Nick upon hearing about this description. But he suppressed it for now.
“You said the mercs are behind this? If they’ve still got her, then you don’t need to worry. It’s just some miscommunication,” Nick said.
“Fuck. Did he think we were going rogue?” Travis muttered to himself. “Prove something. If you have the sort of connections I know our patron has, have the dolls uncuff me.”
Without anything to lose, Nick did exactly that. The conversation was running in circles a little, but he’d learned a ton already. Enough to work with, anyway. If bringing an Archangel in didn’t help, then they were still well off.
He opened the door, careful not to open it too far for Travis. Now that he was paying attention, he might freak out if he saw Rie.
“Uncuff him,” he told a Mark 3. They were almost certainly listening in through his phone, assuming they hadn’t bugged the room or couldn’t hear through the soundproofing.
Without responding, the Mark 3 stepped inside and walked over to Travis. The man’s eyes widened at the unfamiliar model.
“What the fu—” he gasped out.
Then he fell silent as the doll snapped his zip cuffs, then left with them. The door snapped shut once again.
“Well?” Nick said. “They’re the Mark 3s. Brought in by special contract with Sigma.”
“Damn. He really was the real deal. Haven’t heard a thing about them on the Altnet.”
That meant that Travis had truly gone cold, as the Mark 3s had kicked up a storm. Sigma still hadn’t revealed their spec sheet, but they’d been strutting the streets with Nick and probing suspected NLF agents for the past day.
Travis rubbed his wrists, then looked back at Nick. “Don’t know much about the foreigners. Bunch of mercs stuffed full of cybernetics and really expensive toys. The idea was that I put in the backdoor in Tartarus while everyone is distracted by the train delays. Then they’d grab Helena, and we’d finally have a real distributed mainframe to play with. Something that could actually tap into our implants.”
The final sentence sent a chill down Nick’s spine.
“That can what? Travis, are you fucking insane?” Nick snapped, breaking character.
“What?” The older man looked taken aback.
“You don’t let mainframes into your implant. The idea is that you go into their—Fuck.” Nick paced and ran a hand through his hair. “I knew that set-up looked fucking off the moment I saw it. And the neural mods… No wonder the military is all over them.”
“They’re what?” Travis shot to his feet. “Come on, we need to get the fuck out. If the Archangels are here, then the military know where we are. Even our patron can’t override their damn hive mind. I’m not getting gunned down by fucking Kushiel. Let’s fucking go, we can hide at…”
He was at the door before he suddenly trailed off.
Pity. Rie would have been over the moon if Travis had been dumb enough to give away their next location.
“Why the hell would he have sent you here with Archangels and not Liberators? Or Custodians? Or something that isn’t tracking us?” Travis asked, eyes widening in horror. “Nick, you’re—”
The man’s fists clenched, his stance squared off, and he prepared to launch himself at Nick.
Then Meta entered the room and floored him in the blink of an eye. “Aggression levels too high. Interrogation ended.”
“Thanks, Meta,” Nick said drily. “I think it ended a few seconds earlier, though.”
Rie had been right that Travis wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. A decent sleeper agent, by virtue of mediocrity and a simple enough job, but he was in over his head.
Nick stepped outside the room where Rie waited. She was biting her lip.
“I’d say we got enough, even if the military intervenes,” Nick said.
“They’re not intervening. I’ve liaised with Kushiel, and they are satisfied if we provide them with all the evidence found here,” she said.
“Physically or…”
“Yes. I’ll stall them for a little while by providing a written brief, as they weren’t specific enough. The commissioner has also requested that I immediately brief the police executive and the board about the operation. Information control on the Altnet is weaker than expected, so we are releasing suppression early,” she continued.
“I’ll take it I need to return and put on a suit.”
She nodded and gestured for them to walk toward the exit. They began to leave, escorted by a bubble of Mark 1s and his usual guards. Chloe remained behind, busy with the servers.
Nick felt a little naked leaving her behind, as he’d been almost everywhere with her for a few days now.
“The Aesir news story still dominates the Altnet, so we have time, but the commissioner is concerned for personal reasons.” Rie’s expression tightened. “While I suggested that the board could wait a day or two for results, he insisted that you immediately brief the board.”
Nick stopped dead. “Me?”
“You, yes.”
They resumed walking, but his mind buzzed with the fact he’d been personally summoned.
He hoped this wasn’t an execution. What even was the police board? Presumably it was some sort of government committee, right?
“Uh, I have no idea what I’m being asked to do,” Nick said.
“Oh? You sounded so confident on the ride here. Just tell them to wait and everything will be fine.” Rie’s saccharine sweetness had returned, and he took it as a warning sign.
“I said that’s how Welk did things. I’ve spoken to suits like the commissioner before, but a board? Who even are they? I bet they’re a bunch of wealthy bastards that could buy and sell my future fifty times over.”
“Perhaps. Board appointments to the Neo Babylon Police Department are quite competitive. Several of the members aspire to the wealth you imagine those in the Spires hold,” she said.
“I guarantee they’re still filthy rich by my standards.”
Rie rolled her eyes. “Your standards include renting a condemned apartment. To elaborate, Lucas is substantially better off than half the board.”
That made things much clearer. Nick tried to hide his surprise and suspected he failed.
In his imagination, the denizens of the Spires had always been the 1% of the 1%. Anyone who lived in a gigantic fuck-off skyscraper called Olympus, featuring its own internal climate, surely had the money to buy half the population of Babylon.
But if that were truly the case, would there even be room for people like Lucas to elbow their way into power? If liquid gold didn’t run through the veins of the Spires’ residents, what did they bring to the city?
He stepped outside the factory. The bright sunlight shined directly into his face and he shielded his eyes reflexively.
Little had changed out here. Red and blue lights glowed around him, while countless Archangels maintained their positions.
Their convoy sat in front of them, doors open. Rie waved a hand toward one, and Nick stepped inside. His escort piled into the vehicles.
Some sort of neural fight broke out between Juliet, Rosa, and Meta about who would sit next to him, while Rie claimed one side. After a few seconds of glaring, Meta plopped down beside him.
The doors closed and they rocketed off. This time, the blockade opened up in anticipation of them. They only slowed down to protect the civilians in their way, but were soon jetting toward the Spires.
“So what does the board do?” Nick asked after settling in.
“Oversight, officially.” Rie placed a finger over his lips before he cracked a joke about the task force’s name. “While the Spires and the government are seen as one and the same, the police commissioner isn’t given free rein. He still answers to the Spires, and through him, the entire department does as well.”
“So… I’m being held to account for raiding factories that belonged to RTM.”
“Yes.”
“Am I about to be fired?”
“No.”
Well, that was good to know.
Nick leaned back and focused. If he assumed this was an executive board, like in Tartarus, or maybe even the company’s board of directors, he could imagine what they might be interested in.
“Do you know what they’re asking about?” he asked Rie.
Her lips thinned. “No. Commissioner Kim merely asked for you to brief the board about the circumstances of the factory raids and the investigation.”
“So they might be spooked that we’re digging too deep or…” He paused. “Or they’re just worried about the idea that a terrorist group might be targeting them. If the Spires are driven by anything, it’s self-preservation. They only started cleaning everything up after the riots reached their turf.”
Rie remained silent.
“I don’t think I can make them feel better,” Nick admitted. “But after what Travis revealed, I have enough clues about why they’re after Helena. They’re just the worst ones.”
“Care to share them?” Rie asked.
He eyed her. “You heard the same things I did. Travis is working with somebody he thinks has pull in the police, but who is also able to cover their tracks. They hired foreign mercs to grab Helena, but left the NLF out to dry. Why? I don’t know.”
“Because they served their purpose.” Rie’s eyes narrowed. “You know something about the server set-up that you’re not telling me. That’s why you panicked when Travis talked about granting a mainframe access to his implants.”
Nick stared out the window and watched as the city flew past. The Spires rapidly approached. Traffic stayed well clear of the convoy, which rocketed along the highway with lights blaring.
“I thought you had access to all the military files?” he asked.
No response.
After a few seconds, he turned back and looked at Rie. Her eyes were blank. A sure sign she was thoroughly checking some sort of database.
It took nearly a minute for her to return to reality. The other Archangels seemed uncomfortable with her prolonged absence.
“There isn’t anything about implant access in your experiments,” she said slowly. “All neural implants have neural protections against mainframe and doll intrusion, but—”
“Those are to stop accidents,” Nick interrupted. “If you tap into the mind of a doll, you don’t want to mix up commands. You could damage your own implant, or the doll might accidentally harm you. That’s what was happening with Lumen—her mainframe kept treating her interface as part of the main computer, which would have destroyed the interface.”
No matter how humanlike a doll ever acted, the fact was that they were nothing more than silicon at their heart. If a doll directive was ever accidentally executed on the bare metal of a neural implant, the results could be horrifying. The reverse was also true, and manufacturers protected their dolls and interfaces for economic reasons.
But what if a mainframe was explicitly designed to circumvent those protections?
“Our suspect isn’t interested in Helena for her processing power or because she designed emotion engines,” he explained. “He wants her because she can control dolls, interfaces, and implants in bulk. Regardless of safety features. Mainframes aren’t built to do that.”
“But you needed one that did, in order to gather the training data for emotion engines,” Rie said.
She closed her eyes and sighed. Her fingers rubbed the bridge of her nose.
The convoy blew past the last checkpoint around the Spires. They swiftly pulled into the underground parking beneath the police Spire, but the car doors didn’t open.
“You might be wrong,” she said.
“You heard what Travis wanted. And Chloe will confirm how their servers work anyway,” he replied. “But I think it’s a safe assumption.”
Nick turned and faced Rie directly. She stared back at him, her expression stiff.
“I think we might want to bring the military into this,” he said.