15 – Dog Pack

While the van’s AI drove them through the district, Tony turned the driver’s seat to face the cargo compartment. Addie was back there, sitting on a plasteel equipment crate they’d installed. She was talking animatedly to Beef. The big bruiser had his arms folded, but he nodded and grunted agreeably if not enthusiastically as Addie told the tale of Humpty’s hidden features.

Glitchwitch, sitting beside the enforcer, was tapping on a foldable data screen, apparently preferring the tactile feel of the crystal-glass under her fingers to an AUI. She’d mentioned getting her “daemons” ready, and Tony was all for that, but he was a little concerned that they weren’t set to go. They had all night, though; nothing said they had to hit the research facility the second they arrived.

“And then, after I regained a few Dust, I tried the last function—it’s a fancy environmental scanner array. I guess what, um, the guy told me was true: Humpty was a probe meant to investigate the OG Aurora Gate.”

“Huh,” Beef grunted.

Tony grinned. Beef was a character but not much of a conversationalist—especially when there were witnesses. The big guy wore a synth-leather duster that was probably big enough to be a king-sized bedspread, and he’d come packing: a sawed-off shotgun, his signature cleaver, and charged knuckledusters on his left hand.

“That’s it, Beef? Huh?”

“Ads—”

“Ember!” Addie groaned.

Glitch snorted, clicking her tongue in humor as she continued to stare into space. “I mean, I promise I won’t tell anyone who you guys are, but it was pretty easy to figure out. A simple image search for your faces brought me to your news channel…”

Tony sighed. “Eh, we’re not too concerned, but yeah, if we’re working with a client or people we don’t know, please remember not to use our names. Right, Beef?”

“Yeah, sure. Can I just call you corpo? Shepherd feels like a mouthful.”

That comment got Glitch to look up, and she eyed Tony. “Corpo?”

Tony pointedly glared at Beef, saying, “It’s a long—”

Beef chuckled as he interrupted, “When he woke up in the Blast, you could smell the corpo slime dripping off this guy.”

“Beef!” Addie leaned forward and punched his knee—about as effective as throwing a grape at a Christmas ham. “You promised you’d be nice.”

“What?” He honestly looked confused. “I am being nice!”

“Alright, alright.” Tony tried not to growl. “Let’s talk about the job. We all good on the plan?”

Beef arched his heavy brows. “There’s a plan?”

Tony frowned. “Are you being smart, or do you want me to go over it?”

“I’m always smart, but, yeah, go over it.”

Tony nodded, then looked at Glitchwitch. “We good to speak openly in here?”

“Yeah.” She pointed to a small black box mounted to the roof of the cargo space. Tony had seen her installing it, and she’d mentioned it was a “gateway” or something like that. “I hooked up a new hardware firewall for the van’s wireless systems. I need you all to connect your PAIs to it, then I’ll be able to pick up any malware or spy daemons hitchhiking on your streams and scrub ’em.”

“How do we—” Addie started to ask, but then a box popped up on Tony’s AUI, and he supposed she’d gotten one too. It was an invitation to a new local net called Dog Pack.

“Hell, yes,” Beef grunted.

Tony accepted, then arched an eyebrow at Glitchwitch. “Dog Pack?”

She shrugged with an almost shy-looking smirk. “Well, we have a German Shepherd leading us. I saw those vids on Ember’s news site.”

“Ah, that’s bullshit,” Beef muttered, folding his arms over his chest.

“Hey, chill, big boy.” Glitch nudged the sulking giant—easily three times her size—with her elbow. “Of course, I considered your day job when I was naming this network.” Her opaque, pink visor suddenly projected a ten-centimeter holographic eye that winked at Tony.

“Uh, right.” Tony kept his face straight, trying not to clue Beef in on Glitch’s teasing. “So, we all connected?”

Glitch threw a thumbs-up. “All good.”

“Okay, the plan: step one will be Ember using Humpty to get Glitch’s data interceptor into place on the roof.” He looked at Addie, waiting for her eye contact, but she was staring at Glitch’s arm—at her many tattoos, no doubt. Tony couldn’t hold it against her; the netjacker was an interesting-looking woman, and she had a ton of cool tatts. He was pretty sure Addie was just a little fascinated by Glitch’s style, but he hoped she realized Glitch was morethan a little interested in her. “Ember?”

Addie looked at him, blinking, her cheeks instantly revealing her embarrassment. “Yeah?”

“How’s your Dust?”

“Um…one-forty. Plenty to fly Humpty for a long time.”

“Okay. Glitch—”

“Witch,” Addie interrupted.

Glitch waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it, Ember. When I picked this handle, I should have realized everyone would shorten it to Glitch. I don’t really mind; I was mostly teasing last night.”

“What? Last night?” Beef asked, sitting up straighter, his deep-set eyes opening just a little wider. “You two—"

“I told you ten minutes ago, you big lug!” Addie sighed. “She was helping me with Humpty!”

“Oh, uh, right. The drone.” Tony could see Beef’s sudden interest in the conversation fade as he slumped again and his eyes narrowed to slits.

“Glitch?” Tony prompted, and she nodded, clearing her throat.

“Right. My driftjack’s a localized signal sink and honeypot rolled into one. It floods the area with static, jamming net signals while advertising itself as the only viable network gateway. I’ll be able to grab PAI and terminal traffic, run it through here—” she tapped her fingers on the matte-black rectangular deck resting on her knee, “—and block or falsify responses. Like, if they try to check up on you guys through Boxer, I can feed back a false clearance.”

“But that won’t work on the cams, right?” Addie asked.

Before Glitch could reply, Tony said, “Right—not the hardwired ones. So, that’s why we need Humpty for step two. He’ll interface with the security array above the doors, feeding it Glitch’s software.”

“Right!” Glitch leaned forward and gently thumped her fist on Addie’s knee. “I’m going to send you a schematic. Can you try to configure Humpty’s data jack prong to match it?”

“Yep!” Addie pulled her pack closer and unzipped it.

“While you work on that, let me continue with the plan,” Tony said. “Beef, tune in. This is our part.”

“I’m listening, Shep.”

Tony grinned, pleased the big guy was making an effort with his handle. “We’re going to the door.” He reached into his pocket and took out the package of stickers he’d had printed earlier that day. He slid them out of the envelope and fanned them in his hand—fabric-backed, matte black, with that textured weave that caught light just enough to pass for the real thing. The adhesive was pressure-activated and would cling like the sticker had been stitched on by some overworked corpo tailor. They looked legit from a few feet away: Boxer Security Division in silver thread-print. The logo was perfect, but the serial numbers were fake.

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He handed three of them Glitch. “Stick these on the big boy’s coat.” He held onto his, planning to ask Addie to help him out when she was done with Humpty. The drone was currently floating before her, its data jack protruding.

“The hell is this shit?” Beef asked, frowning at Glitch as she reached up to smooth out the synth-leather fabric covering his shoulder. “This is my favorite coat!”

“Relax,” Glitch chuckled. “We just need to wave a heat gun over these stickers, and they’ll peel right off.”

He grumbled but held still as she applied the first one. Tony continued explaining the plan, “So, Beef, we’re going to try to bluff our way in. Just let me do the talking, all right?”

“Sure, but I doubt this will work.”

“Right, it might not. If things aren’t going right, we’ll have to take ’em out.”

“Now you’re talking!” He clenched his left hand, and the metallic bar covering his knuckles crackled with blue sparks.

“Hey!” Addie looked up from her work on Humpty. “You guys aren’t going to kill—”

“Not if we can help it,” Tony said, waving his hand placatingly. “Dead corpos mean a bigger investigation. That’s not something we want.”

“And we don’t like killing, right?” Addie pressed.

“Right.” Tony chuckled. “Speaking of investigations, Beef and I need to worry about our faces.”

“I thought Glitch would have control of the cams,” Addie said as Humpty’s data jack retracted.

“Right, but anyone who sees us, like the guards at the door, will have a local copy of our faces in their PAIs’ memory.” Tony reached into the cargo shelf near Addie’s head and took out a plastic bag. He pulled out two wide, black, rectangular visors. “I had Bert order these. See if you can get this onto that watermelon you call a head, Beef.”

Beef scowled at him but took the visor and tried to slip it over his eyes. The arms weren’t wide enough. He growled, but Glitch snatched it out of his big hand. “Chill, I can fix this.” While she worked on that, Tony put his own visor on and pressed the pairing button atop the left side of the lens.

“Shall I connect?” Nora asked.

“Yeah,” he subvocalized.

As the visor came alive, it became transparent from the inside, and his vision looked almost normal. “These,” he explained, “don’t do much that some decent retinal implants wouldn’t do. What they manage pretty damn well, though, is to interfere with our facial biometrics. Any digital image of us will be distorted—the size of our foreheads, chins, lips, ears. Pretty much any biometric marker for facial recognition will be off. Even better, our irises will be completely covered.”

“What am I supposed to do while you’re in there?” Addie asked.

“You’re the backup and the lookout. You’ll have Humpty in the air, watching the whole block for anything we didn’t anticipate. Glitch will be busy managing all the comms and security footage, so you need to watch her back too.”

Addie nodded. “Okay.”

“Can you do my patches?” He held the stickers out, and Addie jumped up, coming to sit in the passenger seat beside him. While she started on his left shoulder, he said, “Listen, you guys, Beef’s not wrong; odds are things are going to get messy. We don’t exactly look like corpo-sec, at least not enough for these guys to feel comfortable handing over their prisoner to us. So, just anticipate it, I guess. If it’s part of the plan, it’s nothing to panic about, right?”

Beef grunted, and Glitch said, “I’ll make sure they don’t get out any calls for help.”

“Right. Just be careful,” Addie said, smoothing the fabric of his jacket over his chest. He smiled at her, safe behind the opaque lens of his visor. She pressed the sticker to his chest, close enough that he could feel the soft puffs of her breath as she worked to activate the glue. It was almost more than he could bear, the weight of her closeness mixed with the soft pressure of her knee against his, rubbing as the van’s lousy suspension jostled them this way and that.

When Glitch had insisted they stay and hang out for a drink—or three—he’d been relieved. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to spend time with Addie. No, it was more that he was afraid he wanted it too much. What would he do if she really fell for him? It was clear she liked him, but if things got too real… What then? Would he let himself go there, or would he destroy it all?

“There,” Addie said, gently smoothing the patch, smiling softly.

“Uh, thanks,” he said weakly, turning his seat to separate himself from the wall of heat building between them. He feigned making adjustments to the van’s controls, gesturing to the windshield. “We’re almost there.”

Addie cleared her throat and turned her seat toward the back. “I’ll get Humpty ready.”

“Perfect,” he said softly, almost a whisper. He hadn’t lied when he told her he was working with Nora to confront his bottled-up emotions. He was, but those emotions ran deep. He had so much rage buried in there that if he let it all out at once, people would die—him included. His memories were fractured, but he remembered enough to know that things ran a lot deeper than just his betrayal. When he tried to summon those broken images, though, they choked him with a suffocating horror, leaving him paralyzed. He couldn’t even talk about it with Nora, let alone Addie.

So, he was taking it slow, working around that black hole of fear and regret, chipping at the edges, facing the smaller issues one by one. Nora thought Addie was good for him. She thought that having someone, something meaningful, in his life would help keep him anchored to the present, keep him from spiraling into the past. But was that fair to Addie? What if she got caught up in something he couldn't finish?

“Beef’s all set,” Glitch announced.

“I can speak for myself, doll,” the bruiser grumbled.

Tony grinned, glad to have his introspection interrupted.

“Doll, huh? Well, I think you’re cute too, but you’re gonna need to work on your conversation skills.”

Addie audibly choked, and Tony’s grin widened. The van slowed and pulled into an empty parking spot two buildings down from their target—a nondescript two-story structure housing the Boxer satellite lab.

“All right, lovebirds, here we are.” He turned in his seat just in time to see Glitch giving Beef’s visor a final adjustment. It looked like it was made for him, which was hard to believe; the thing had been a good five centimeters too narrow when he’d first tried it on. “How’d you get it to fit so perfectly?” he asked.

She reached up to point, but Beef flinched away from her touch. “Hold still, you big softie! I just want to show T—er, Shepherd, the hinge I added.”

Tony sighed. Apparently, she hadn’t been lying about finding him and Addie online. He supposed it wasn’t much of a surprise—she was a netjacker, after all.

He squinted at Beef’s visor and saw what she meant: she’d replaced the hinges where the visor arms met the lens. “How the hell did you have hinges like that on hand?”

She stretched her foot out and kicked her big plasteel rolling case. “I’ve got everything but a toilet in this big boy.”

Tony looked at the clock on his AUI: 0014. “They had a shift change fifteen minutes ago. We’re good to go whenever. Anyone got any final thoughts on the plan?”

“How many corpo-sec inside?” Beef asked, turning to glare, looking even scarier than usual with the black visor over his eyes.

“We’re not a hundred percent sure, but we saw six come and go during their shift changes.”

“So at least four inside?”

“Right.”

While Tony and Beef spoke, Glitch pulled a black, shoebox-sized box out of her case. It had a single metal ring riveted to the top but was otherwise featureless. “This is my driftjack. It weighs a lot because it has big batteries; it’s a thirsty boy. Unless you can find a power outlet up on the roof, it’ll run for about forty-five minutes.”

Tony frowned. The thing was bigger than he’d anticipated. “Can Humpty carry it? By the way, file this under shit we should have tested last night.”

“Don’t get crabby, Shepherd,” Addie said, as Humpty hummed close to the box and his metallic tentacle noiselessly extended from an aperture in his shell. With precision that was hard to believe, Addie sent the tentacle through the metallic loop on top of the driftjack and then coiled it around itself. Humpty lifted it off the van floor, humming only slightly louder than he usually did. “Not a problem. I don’t see a significant increase in my Dust usage.”

“Damn, that drone’s great,” Glitch whispered, her pink visor fixated on the object of her affection.

“Alright, let’s do this.” Tony gestured to the back door. “Beef, let the drone out and don’t slam the door.”

Beef grunted, heaving his bulk forward so he could reach the handle on the rear doors. As soon as he pushed the right-hand one open, Humpty burbled out into the dark, then rapidly rose out of view. When Beef pulled the door closed, Tony got up and curtained off the cab with the same old cargo blanket he’d used before. He was eager to get a proper adaptive tint on the glass, but that took money, and they were still on a budget.

“How’s it look, Ember?” Glitch asked. “I can see from my driftjack’s signal that you’re over the building.”

“Looks fine. Same as last night. Two guys on the door. No new hardware that I can see. The street’s quiet. You want the, uh, driftjack right in the middle of the roof?”

“No, put it by an air scrubber. It won’t stand out as much.”

Tony watched Addie concentrating, impressed, as usual, by her talent. Her eyes were pretty in any situation, but when she ran Humpty, especially in a dark space like the back of the van, they had an amber-hued back-glow that was really something. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to get his head in the game. He drew his pistol from the holster inside his waistband, checked that a blue-tipped, armor-piercing round was in the chamber, then stuffed it back. He had an extra mag on his belt, so twenty-eight rounds altogether.

His shotgun was in the case where Addie was sitting, but he didn’t think he’d bring it. Beef had his shotgun, and Tony didn’t want to look too threatening when they walked out of the darkness toward that guarded door. If things went sideways, he was confident he could…acquire another weapon if needed.

“All set,” Addie said. “Ready for me to connect to the security array?”

Glitch tapped on her crystal-glass display, her visor flickering with magenta lights. “Do it.”

“Okay… Lowering Humpty from the roof. The guards are right underneath, but one is smoking a vape, and the other is talking—telling a joke.” She sucked her lower lip between her teeth and softly chewed it as she concentrated. A moment later, she announced, “I’m in.”

Glitch nodded. “Got the signal.” The netjacker’s deck could interface with Dust-tech, and Addie had opened a port for her—something they’d tested the night before, after Addie had finally persuaded Glitch to stop hounding her about a tattoo. “Holy shit!” the netjacker said, chuckling almost nervously. “It worked!”

Beef turned to stare at Tony, lifting his visor so his dark eyes glinted in the dim light of the cargo lamp. “Hey, corpo, why the hell does your netjacker sound surprised?”