The Huntress Chronicles

Beyond the Grip of the Electronic Vise

Part three of the Huntress Chronicles

Cut-scenes and notes:

Unpacking equipment and personal effects onto the Homestead Station, upper LEO:

Ominous foreshadow to the picture burning in the crippled station. Valarie “Jett” Benning is looking at an old picture of Chris’s from the Militia Wars. It is of Chris and a few others in a trench/foxhole. They are dressed in ragged and mismatched military outfits with an assortment of weapons. The two main subjects are grinning stupidly at the camera as an artillery battle rages over the crest behind them. Diana’s POV.

“Who’s this?” Jett asked, pointing to a figure in the picture.

“This is an old friend of mine, Steven,” the Captain said, pointing to the bearded figure on the left. “And this,” he continued, pointing to himself, “is Jonathon.” Jett looked slightly humored, smirking at him with a pained grin.

“Let me guess, he’s your evil twin?” she chuckled.

“No,” Chris said quietly, “my good one.” Jett was taken back, she looked to me for a clue as to what was going on. I averted my eyes, not wanting to get involved with this particular conversation.

“This is you isn’t it?” Jett queried, unsure.

“Yes,” he admitted, “but it was a long time ago--another life. Before the wars, before the Flats.”

Jett chilled as a dark pall settled over the sterile room. She shuddered despite herself at the mention of the Flats. It was there that America had felt the full punch of its civil disorders in the form of a home-built terrorist nuke. The site, a mere twenty miles west of Denver, was desolate. Avoided by the wary, there was nothing left but the hulk of a Government facility and radioactive glass. She had seen it from the air once or twice. It was a horrible place, a still-bleeding wound on the otherwise beautiful Front Range landscape.

CPU Pod: Homestead Station. Post Jett’s death.

Chris is hacking into an old FTP connection at UNC. He will use this undefended link to try to locate the Neonet Fault Nexus at Engineer Muhad’s office in Alexandria, Egypt. KFMO Corporal Kimberly C. Johnson was introduced earlier. Some of T’Plani’s lines will be echoes of Jett’s from earlier.(“When do I fool around?” “Aye, aye sir.”) Diana’s POV.

“Little do they know that all of this is still built upon the old DoD protocols,” Chris continued, sweeping his arm out over the cell-deck as if to include the entire Neonet.

“Dee-Oh-Dee?” Kim questioned, not quite catching the reference.

“Department of Defense, DARPAnet,” Chris mused, “back before they started to recall themselves the Department of War.” Pops had on that mischievous grin that he always wore when discussing what he referred to as “the good ole’ days.” Kim, on the other hand, looked more perplexed than ever. He little face showed an innocence rare to the world. Ignorance is bliss....

“The defense of what?” she asked.

“The United States of... ,” he started before catching Kim’s eye. Seeing that she was about to ask the next obvious question, he stopped his incessant typing and swiveled in mid-air to fully face us.

“I’m sorry, I keep forgetting how young you two are.” His inclusion of me in that statement reminded me that I had run almost the exact line of questioning at him years before. I caught a grin from him as he turned to talk solely to Kim--he had never forgotten in the first place.

Chris gives Kim a quick rundown of modern US history. He then has Airjock patch in a small relay dish to the Neonet satellite system. They initiate a link to the Neonet Protocol number 001NA-138.86.7.6. It’s unable to connect....

“Damn, they changed it on me,” Chris fumed, hitting the flat of his fist into a padded support bulkhead. He grabbed a rung, stopping the spin he had begun, and rolled his shoulders in an attempt to relax.

“Ok, let’s see if the old boys kept up the pattern,” he said mostly to himself. Pops fumbled for a tangled headset microphone out of the corner of his eye. I grabbed it, unknotting it as best I could before handing it to him. He mumbled a thanks, eyes still staring at the digit-filled screen as he put it on and plugged it into his deck.

“T’Plani, link me to 001NA-138.86.7.1”

“Initiating Captain,” came the computer’s soft voice from a wall-speaker near our heads. Even through her lilting, flowing voice, she somehow sounded slightly sad. She’s just a machine. I have to keep believing that, anything else is too terrifying to accept. I looked from Chris’s hunched back as he adjusted neural interface jacks and fiber-optic data lines to the main CPU complex across the cylindrical room--wondering exactly what he had created in there. The soft hum of the speaker reformed itself into T’Plani’s graceful dialogue as Chris finished wiring himself to the wall.

“Initiating: Unable to link to system machine: Dijkstra. Automatic relay initiated: Unable to link to system machine: Hopper...” It continued for five minutes while pops looked on anxiously. Each time the relay hung-up he visually tensed. I won’t even try to describe what his thermal signature looked like. He got increasingly nervous as the names of long-defunct systems scrolled by: Dijkstra, Hopper, Fisher, Gecko, and on and on.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Kim hazarded.

“It must work,” Chris determinedly muttered, “it’s the only way in.”

Chris glanced for his watch, only to notice that he had misplaced it again.

“You’re getting old pop,” I offered, checking my own skinwatch, “It’s 05:36 ECT.”

“This is taking too damn long, the NSA bastards could have tracked us by now.”

I put up my hand to silence Kim from asking whom the NSA bastards were. I had no clue myself, but I knew better than to bug Chris with stupid questions at a time like this. Kim’s little face held a deeply hurt expression, she didn’t like taking orders from someone outside the organization. She could go get fragged for all I cared.

As Chris started frantically plugging the last few wires into his cell-deck, she shut-up and became interested. He nailed the power-stud on his ‘deck with a thumb. The portable computer immediately began to hum and tumble up and off the workbench, tethered only by its multiple wire appendages.

“T’Plani, raise shields and engage the cloak,” he stated confidently as he stared at the screen. It was still relaying data when the room was plunged into darkness--the only light coming from the dimly glowing controls and screens. My left-side James Hong optic began to compensate for the lower photon count, the room appearing to take on an eerie green glow. I was able to make out Chris poised, hovering, above his custom cell-deck.

“Captain, full Neonet intruder defenses are on-line and I have disengaged all non-vital electromagnetic emissions from Homestead Station. We are a hole in space Chris,” she paused, evaluating something. Chris waited patiently, going over his readouts one last time. In the gap I could hear Kim floating beside me in the dark, breathing shallowly.

“Would you like to terminate the link to Neonet Protocol code number 001NA-138.86.7.1?” she asked as calmly as a person holding a piece of twine taut against the edge of a mono-knife. Her voice sounded oddly like Jett’s, Chris must have noticed it too.

“No babe, keep it open. When it stabilizes I want you to get in there through the FTP lines and find the GPS coordinates for Engineer Muhad’s office in Alexandria, Egypt.” He too paused, as if considering something personally important.

“And T’Plani, keep it quiet and fast--no fooling around this time!” he nearly shouted, overly tense.

“When do I fool around?” the computer responded with an almost playful tone of voice.

“Just do it, ok?” Chris asked, sounding tired and beaten in the dark.

“Sure thing Chris,” she responded solemnly, clicking off the speaker. Chris took a deep breath, probably trying to get her voice out of his head. I began to pose a question, but Kimmie beat me to the draw.

“What the frack is so important about the Egyptian Empire?!?” she called out, voicing my question exactly. Chris stopped typing and again turned to face us. Draped in neural-interface connections and other assorted wiring, he was silhouetted against the softly illuminated monitors and control panels. Even with my optical compensation I couldn’t make out his face. He became very calm, and his voice drifted to us out of the darkness as if he was speaking to himself more than anyone.

“I once read a long time ago that the planned connection for the fiber-optic world link between Europe, Africa, and Asia was to be laid at this certain engineer’s office building. If bureaucracy is anything, it’s predictable. The current transcontinental link is no doubt in the very same location. By sending T’Plani down the old unmonitored file transfer lines, I hope to find the GPS location of that office building--but that’s only the beginning. They don’t build things as redundantly as they used to. When I wipe out that link, it’ll drop Africa, most of Europe, and parts of Asia off the Neonet for hours.” He chuckled to himself as he turned back to his machines.

“It’s going to be one hell of a diversion.”

I looked to Kim and caught her staring back at me. She looked scared from the kind of deep-down fear that you get when you realize that you commanding officer might just be insane. I knew better, I had seen pop like this before. He had told me that there was a fine line between genius and insanity, and that you had to surf the very edge. Chris wasn’t mad, not yet at least. It wasn’t Kim that should be scared, it should be Advance Engineering Incorporated. If instantaneously dropping one third of the planet to the tech level of the 1970’s was just the diversion, then the real payback was going to be a bitch. Advance was going to pay for Jett’s death, and they had better be scared.

“Relay loop has stabilized,” T’Plani quietly announced, “I have connected to system machine name: Isaacson, Neonet Protocol number 001NA-138.86.7.42.”

“This is it people,” Chris stated, “T’Plani, you know what to do. It’s time to show those neo-punk, twenty-something, corporate bastards whom not to fuck with.”

“Aye, aye sir!” T’Plani called cheerfully as her artificial consciousness sped off into the ancient roots of the Neonet. The payback had begun.