All haan might pay….
“Sam, you ready?”
I looked over and saw Vamp standing in the doorway. I hopped down off the bed, got my things from the bed stand and headed over.
“He kick your ass?” he asked.
“No.”
“Really?”
“He’s going to help us.”
Vamp looked a little skeptical about that. “He might change his mind once he hears your little idea. Come on, I’ve got something I want to run by you.”
“What is it?”
“We’ll talk in the car.”
“About what?” I asked. He looked back and smiled.
“Finding out what’s real,” he said.
Chapter Six
Vamp had come to pick me up in his new-slash-used beater aircar, a piece of shit that he loved and which I did too even though I made fun of it all the time. The outside was a mix of faded black and rust, glossed over with flickering lightpaint that formed a snakelike, long-whiskered dragon on either side. The ashtray didn’t look like another butt would fit in it, and every time he took a corner too fast, which was always, ash tipped out and sprinkled down onto the floor mat.
“What was Dao-Ming doing there?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. She came with Dragan,” he said.
“Oh.” That surprised me a little. Dragan had met Dao-Ming, and I knew they got along, but I didn’t expect to see them together. “So… how’s she doing?”
“She’s calmed down since last night,” Vamp said, “but she’s still talking crazy. She asked Dragan for a gun.”
“Maybe she’s onto something,” I said. “This could get dangerous.”
“He said no. The last thing she needs is a gun.”
“Not her,” I said. “Us.”
He glanced sideways at me.
“We don’t need guns, Sam.”
“We might, before this is over.”
He shook his head. “If we get pinched, it’ll be by security. You go pointing a gun at them, you’ll just get killed. Besides, the last time you used one you didn’t like it so much, remember?”
“I guess.”
“Anyway,” he said, jumping up into the skylane above us. A horn blared, and someone yelled at us while Vamp stuck his middle finger out the window. “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night.”
“Which part?” I asked.
“The part about cutting off the power grid.”
“Oh.”
Pieces of the dream from the night before still lingered in my mind, faint, but there.
“…bring down the force field….”
“Is that really something we could do? Black out the whole city?”
Vamp nodded. “We can do it.”
That surprised me a little, even though it had been my idea. I think I’d expected it to get shot down.
“Are you being serious?”
He nodded. “Hangfei’s power grid is pretty open to attack, to be honest. A lot of that equipment predates the haan. Years back, an old friend of mine, Shuang Po, came up with the idea to dick around with the supply data. I’d manipulate the consumption figures, which would drive the price up and down. Then she’d make rigged trades online and cash in. Another guy, Chen Chong, worked as an engineer inside Liàngzı chuán Relay and Power and helped us get access in return for a cut. It turned out to be more trouble and risk than it was really worth. By then the Channel X site was bringing in three times the money for almost no effort, but we were totally tapped into the grid. Once you had your hooks in there, you could destabilize the system, too, if you wanted.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I figured something like that would be super secure.”
“You’d be surprised. Those systems were created a long time ago. You’d shit if you knew how open to attack some of the transportation systems are. The power company even knows they’re vulnerable, and they just haven’t wanted to spend the money or time to update their security.”
I thought about that. Hacking around for celebrity 3i pictures or online passwords was one thing. The penalty for that kind of thing was bad enough, but this… now that I thought about it, it scared me a little.
“You really think you can get in?” I asked him.
“I know I can,” he said. “I contacted Shuang and Chong last night, and they’re up for giving it a go again.”
“Do they know why?”
“No. Turns out Chong got fired a couple years back and he’s pissed at Liàngzı chuán so I didn’t have to twist his arm too hard.”
“What about the other one?” I asked.
He made a little shrug. “Shuang… she’s got her own reasons.”
“But you trust them?”
“They’d be in this as deep as we would be.”
“So does this mean you believe what I said? Last night?”
“It means I want to see whatever it was you saw.”
He changed lanes again, dropping down into the one below as he closed in on the exit up ahead.
“So… how would we be able to actually kill the power?” I asked. “You can hack in and just shut it off?”
“No,” he said. “There’s no off switch. We’d be causing what they call a cascading failure. They’ve happened before just from faulty equipment and caused minor, regional blackouts throughout the city. Basically, the way it works is electrical power is stored in different nodes on the grid, and each node has a certain capacity it can store. If a node fails, the stored power is offloaded to surrounding nodes until it can be repaired. If that extra, offloaded power tips a surrounding node over capacity then it will trip and fail as well, offloading its load to the surrounding nodes, and so on. If one or more of those nodes fails you get a localized power cut. If we can trick one or more key nodes into believing they’ve been overloaded, then they’ll shut down and offload their charges, and if we can disable certain fail-safes, then the failures should cascade out of control.”
“And that will black out Hangfei?”
“If the failure’s bad enough, yes.”
“And we’ll see what’s really going on in Hangfei,” I said. “Everyone will.”
“It might kill their force field, too,” Vamp said. “Could mean trouble for them. You okay with that?”
“The haan can defend themselves. I just want to know what’s real, for better or worse.”
“Could be worse.”
“Then it’ll be worse,” I said. “At least it’ll be true.”
“And if nothing happens at all?” he asked.
He said it casual-like, but braced a little for the spark of anger, or maybe just self-doubt that I felt. The anger did rise in my chest, but in the face of what he was offering it couldn’t pick up much steam.
“Then nothing happens,” I said. I watched him a minute, his eyes full of… something that his voice didn’t let on. He’d already waded out pretty far on this one. I lowered my voice, and added, “You’d seriously do that for me?”
“Yeah, Sam. I would.”
I leaned over and kissed him, causing him to swerve. A horn behind us blared.
“You are the best.”
I could have jumped him, right there. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the fear I walked around with eased off, just a little. For the first time since my life got turned upside down months back, I felt like there was something I could actually do.
“How long would it take?” I asked him. “To do it?”
“I’ll need to scope it out,” he said. “But a lot of the work’s been done. It could happen fast.”
“How fast?”
“Weeks,” he said. “If that. Unless they did some massive upgrade since the last time we poked around in there. Hang on.”