Enter Darkness by Tobias Cabral & Joseph Cautilli & Marisha Cautilli

Author:Tobias Cabral & Joseph Cautilli & Marisha Cautilli [Cabral, Tobias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Night Sky
Published: 2021-06-18T22:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

“Well, that was a whole lotta nothing!” Tom Murdoch remarked, dropping wearily into a desk chair in the Earth Corps medical facility’s Administration suite, across from Charlie Meleno.

Charlie sighed. “Yah, it was worth a shot that you might be able to get something more out of him. Should’ve known better when not even Charlotte was able to wring out another dram.”

“Is it just me, or are these PURT bastards compartmentalizing a damn sight better than they ever used to?” Tom mused.

“Looks like Kavazh has tightened up their game alright,” Charlie agreed, a worried look on his face.

Only two men survived today’s raid. One was still in a coma after McCain briefly revived and interrogated him, and the other, a Kjell Nilsson needed extensive repairs to his ears from his proximity to the stun grenade’s detonation. All they knew was what their immediate handlers told them: At a specified time, they would hijack the routine security patch transmission from Earth Corps’ satellite and inject a bundle of code. Insert Tab-A into Slot-B. They were little more than armed ‘script-kiddies,’ low-level hackers and goons, all.

Thoughtfully, Charlie mused, “This is the most...vigorously I can recall the Corps going after PURT targets in quite a while…”

“Well, they did just try and brain-wipe the whole outfit...What’re you chewing on, Pard?”

“Probably nothing. It’s just seemed to me like those asshats were practically getting a hall pass; hadda be some heavy stuff before we’d even try for a take-down. But once we knew where to look, we could pretty much map out the time when Makka joined the party. And sure enough, that’s when PURT moved back up the Speed-Dial. Check my math?”

“I mean, yeah. It lines up now that you mention it. But…”

Charlotte McCain’s uncharacteristically agitated face popped up on the main wall terminal. “Guys, you need to teleport to the Bull-Pen! We just got another packet from Telcel, and... just get up here!” Her face vanished. Tom and Charlie shot each other a look, then surged from the office and over to the elevator to HQ ten floors above.

They found Charlotte pacing like a caged cat, talking furiously into her comm. “Get right on it, and keep me flooded with status reports, copy? Gotta go.” She signed off, tapped her comm, flicked her wrist in their direction, and their devices chimed simultaneously.

“Oh my god!” Both men cried in unison.

“That’s more or less what I said,” Charlotte replied. “But with a lot more profanity. And no, we have no idea what to look for. The Ground-To-Air point defenses on these towers is Tops of the Tops. Pretty much everyone knows, if anyone tried to Nine-Eleven these beasts it wouldn’t be like the Twin Towers. Best they could hope for is to make extra work for the street-cleaners. If they’re planning to go for this, then they must have tech we haven’t seen before.”

“That’s…” Tom ventured. “Not a lot to go on!”

Charlie began pacing, thinking aloud. “Okay, so we’ve got the ‘Soon’ part. Sounds sorta like they were looking to blind us then blitz us.

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