Duncan looked over the confidentiality agreement she’d handed him. He was no legal expert, but it looked straightforward enough.
He signed it and gave a copy back to Rosalie.
“What about them?” Duncan asked, nodding toward the surviving Allegheny.
“None of my business no more,” Rosalie answered with a smile.
And with that, Rosalie started walking away. Duncan considered stopping her, but Cecile wasn’t reacting, and the merc’s logic did make some sense. Maybe there was nothing he could do. Or rather, nothing he was willing to do. There had been enough bloodshed.
In any case, the window had closed. Rosalie had distanced herself and would soon be out of sight.
“You better give us back what we bought and let us be,” the Allegheny leader warned. “Here be the second daughter of the chief of the Erie tribe. You don’t wanna be trifling with us. I can see your bones through your soft skin, and I have shared their sign with our bloodhounds through the whispering forest. If you don’t release us, they will come for you. Then we will add your bones to my staircase.”
She sounded like she was spouting some sort of tribal myth. More importantly, unless the “whispering forest” was real, she had no leverage. There was no way for her tribe to know about what had happened here unless she made it back to them.
Could he let her go? He knew little of the Allegheny, so he couldn’t count on any moral code of secrecy as he could with the mercs. He couldn’t trust that by sparing these two they would in turn forgive them for the death of her tribesman. And he couldn’t forget she was a cannibal. Can one trust a cannibal? Should one factor that into one’s thinking on a decision of such moral consequence? It was hard not to.
Duncan whispered a small prayer, turning to the Credo for guidance. “Please give me the temperance to understand, please give me the will to choose wisely.”
To kill was competition, one of the three fears. It was against the Credo’s tenets of cooperation. But here this concern was soundly trumped by the need for prudence. It would be reckless to let them live. If the Allegheny came after them, his life was at stake, as well as the lives of his men, and perhaps many more. And there were so few that knew the truth behind the Detonation.
He sighed. It looked like there would have to be more bloodshed after all.
VITADYNE
Axel awoke with a start, instinctively throwing his blanket off the couch. His phone and pager were buzzing urgent call signs at him.
It was Grant.
“What is it?” Axel asked.
“Severe risk level detected at Vitadyne Corp in New Jersey. Need to eliminate immediately. A chopper is on its way.”
The couch in the basement had become a permanent sleeping arrangement for him. It was also one he rarely used. This was the fourth severe risk incident in the last week, and the third one occurring at night.
The chopper picked him up from the beach five minutes later. It leaned into an aggressive turn to head due west while Axel checked his supplies. It was only when he saw the empty seats beside him that he remembered. His two teams were on missions in California and Turkey. There was no way for them to get here in time. He would have to go in solo.
“We detected IP impressions that looked like they could be a Wog-spawned AGI.”
“But Vitadyne isn’t even on our list, is it?”
“That’s right, which means they’ve been cloaking their operation. It’s possible the IP impressions were some kind of screw-up, maybe a rogue developer within Vitadyne. There was a developer name attached to the impressions—his name is Neil Pawluka. We will send you his file shortly. We’ve sent him counterfeit voice and email alerts asking him to return to work immediately. Hopefully he’ll be there when you arrive.”
“What do the IP impressions tell you about what we’re dealing with?”
“Not much, except that the AGI is in an exponential learning mode. Not sure what constraints Vitadyne has on it, or if it has any kind of kill-switch. Regardless, we need to wipe out the whole operation.”
“Really? This isn’t some garage start-up. This is Vitadyne. You said so yourself. And it’s just me today. We may need to go back later after the initial AGI excision.”
“Let’s make the call on the ground.”
How could he possibly eliminate the whole software division of a major multinational corporation… on his own? The internal virus plant couldn’t be trusted to access all servers and computers. Grant and Bhavin’s demands were getting more and more ludicrous.
Vitadyne’s headquarters were in an urban location with no landing field nearby, and there were no unmarked Nadar-controlled cars available, so he had to air-jump. A distinctive I am getting too old for this feeling resonated as he strapped on his parachute and checked it over.
One advantage of doing ops late at night was the empty streets. Axel guided his chute down onto a side street half a kilometer from Vitadyne. A car was crossing a nearby intersection when he landed.
“Grant, do you see this car? We need to eliminate any exposure.”
“Got it. A local law enforcement camera has the license plate. Subject ID’d. Phone corrupted and remote monitoring enabled.”
Although he did get annoyed with Grant’s demands, Axel had to admit, he was good.
Axel ran through the spitting rain to the Vitadyne building and looked for the location on the wall Grant had described. They didn’t have time for Grant to create a fake ID for Axel so they had to do things the old-fashioned way.
He found the external security camera and placed the handheld image repeater device in front of it. The repeater was ineffective ten percent of the time, but they would have to risk it. Axel then went to work on the window below, using his diamond cutter to slice a circle big enough for him to enter. He removed the cut section of glass with a small suction cup.
“Second floor, cubicle B3,” Grant said into his earbud.
Once inside the building, Axel replaced the circular window fragment, temporarily sealed the incision with transparent glue and then walked up a large, crisscrossing ramp. The top opened up to a bank of at least forty cubicles. Lights were on, but no one was immediately visible.
He walked quietly up to row B and then down the aisle. It was easy to see Neil. His long shaggy hair was draped over large noise-cancelling headphones, and his head was shifting back and forth to the rhythm of whatever song was playing.
When Axel was close, he could see three monitors, a laptop, and two large memory drives. One of them was one of the newer ten-terahertz machines. Behind the equipment, and above Neil’s desk, was a picture of a mountain biker tearing down a slope with a lightning bolt lancing down into the horizon behind him. There was a jet of mud coming off the back tire, accentuating the speed of the biker.
“Hello, Neil,” Axel said.
Neil stopped bouncing his head and pulled off his headphones.
“Oh sorry, I didn’t see you there. Are you with Venti?”
“Venti couldn’t come in, so I came in instead. My name is Paul—I’m with Vitadyne management.”
“Okay. So why am I here? That email and phone call scared the crap out of me.”
“What were you doing at 11:40 p.m.?”
His face went ruddy. “I was here, working.”
“On what, specifically.”
“Hey, you know, can you show me your ID? Venti told me I had to ask anyone I hadn’t seen before.”
He might have to do this the hard way.
It didn’t look like there were any alarms nearby, and Neil looked fairly athletic, but Axel doubted he could overtake him.