The smuggler’s barge, The Rust-Eater, groaned as it scraped against the maintenance dock. The sound was a low complaint of tortured metal, swallowed by the hiss of the acid rain and the whine of the barge’s dying engine. Ahead, the Broadcast Hub clawed at the bruised purple sky, a skeleton of rusted iron lattice disappearing into the smog. Faint red warning lights blinked erratically along its length, like the last, failing heartbeats of a forgotten god. The air tasted of rust and ozone. Kaito’s goal was simple: get inside that blockhouse at the tower’s base.
He and Eva went over the side, their boots splashing into the ankle-deep, chemical-slick water of the dock. The perimeter fence was a relic, its chain-links sagging and furred with corrosion. Kaito pulled a pair of heavy bolt cutters from his pack, the worn metal cold against his palm. The price of this assault was their last hiding place; there was no retreat from this shore. He found a weak point in the fence and clamped the jaws of the cutters around the rusted wire.
The snap of the metal was obscenely loud in the relative quiet of the industrial fringe. Eva didn’t flinch, her kinetic pistol held steady as she scanned the darkness around them. Kaito cut a second wire, then a third, peeling back a section of the fence just wide enough to slip through. He went first, his broken wrist sending a sharp, grinding protest up his arm. He ignored it. Pain was just data. He secured the far side, giving Eva a sharp nod. She followed, moving with a fluid silence that belied the tension coiling in the air.
Caleb Jericho and Morgan Webb came next, scrambling through the opening like ghosts summoned from the past. Caleb’s prosthetic arm whirred softly, his mechanical eye already scanning the ferrocrete blockhouse. Webb clutched a data-slate to his chest as if it were a holy text, his patched thermal jacket soaked through. They reached the main entrance, a heavy blast door sealed by a mag-lock so old it was practically an antique.
Caleb didn’t hesitate. He knelt, his prosthetic fingers unscrewing a corroded service panel. A tangle of thick, insulated cables spilled out. He interfaced his diagnostic claw with a series of ports, his face illuminated by the cascade of dead code scrolling across his ocular implant. The air filled with the smell of hot dust and cooling solder.
— Legacy ICE, — Caleb’s synthetic voice rasped. — Seven layers. Brute force is out. I need to find the master interrupt. It’ll be a physical breaker somewhere in the sequence.
Morgan Webb had set up his own terminal nearby, a custom rig of salvaged parts. He was already prepping the payload, Anya’s consciousness, the shielded data-chip slotted into the rig’s main reader. On his screen, her data appeared not as code, but as a shimmering, chaotic field of light, a captured storm of thought and feeling.
— Just get us in, Caleb, — Webb murmured, his focus absolute. — I need to format the testimony for the broadcast buffer. The old protocols are specific.
Caleb grunted, his fingers flying across a virtual keypad only he could see. The first layer of security fell with a dull clunk from the mag-lock. Then the second. He worked with a surgeon’s precision, dismantling a system that had been dormant for half a century. Kaito stood guard, watching the perimeter, every shadow a potential threat. The rain fell harder, a relentless drumming that seemed to count down the seconds. He felt a phantom echo of the Severance Tone in his spine, a memory of pain that the Hub’s raw power seemed to stir.
— The fifth layer is a logic loop, — Caleb muttered, more to himself than to them. — Clever. For its time.
He rerouted a power conduit, shorting the loop and bypassing the trap. A moment later, a final, heavy thud echoed from the blast door. A single green light flickered above the lock.
— We’re in, — Caleb said, pulling his claw free from the fried port.
Morgan Webb didn’t need to be told. He initiated the transfer, his fingers dancing across his own keyboard. — Uploading Anya’s consciousness to the Hub’s broadcast buffer. The file is fragmented. It will take time to coalesce.
— How much time? — Kaito asked, his voice low.
— Five minutes, — Webb answered without looking up. — Maybe four. The buffer is fighting the file’s structure.
The countdown began. Four minutes. A lifetime. Kaito could feel the seconds stretching, each one a wire pulled taut. The control room was a cavern of decaying technology, racks of silent servers standing in rows. The only light came from their terminals and the emergency strips on the floor. The upload progress bar on Webb’s screen crept to ten percent.
A soft hiss cut through the hum of the machinery.
The main door on the far side of the control room, the one leading to the tower’s primary access shaft, slid open. A figure stood silhouetted against the dim, rain-swept light of the corridor beyond. Tall, lean, and perfectly still. Heath Taggart. His cybernetic eye, a single point of glowing red, swept the room, taking in the scene with cold, machinelike assessment. The patrol pod’s final report had been accurate.
— This is an inefficient action, — Taggart’s voice was a flat, synthesized baritone, devoid of all emotion. It cut through the room, a statement of pure, performative logic. — It will not alter the outcome.
Kaito stepped forward, placing himself between Taggart and the console where Webb and Caleb worked. The data-slate was gone, but the ghost was still here. He had to protect it.
— You’re wrong, — Kaito said, his voice steady. He felt a strange clarity, the final shedding of a mask he hadn’t realized he was still wearing. — It’s the only thing that does.
He keyed his comm, the one Eva had patched into their private channel. He spoke the words she had taught him in The Weft, the black-market code phrase that felt like a lifetime ago. A piece of their shared history, a tool forged in trust.
— The loom is tangled.
It was a desperate, nonsensical gambit. A ghost signal on a dead channel. But Taggart was a creature of the System, his every thought and action mediated by a constant stream of data. For a fraction of a second, the enforcer paused. A flicker in the red light of his eye. His network link, flooded with a high-priority security alert from a source it couldn’t identify, was momentarily confused. A half-second of processing conflict.
It was a flaw in the perfect machine.
It was enough.
He saw the opening. He had to move now.
