Salim proved to be a man of few words as he drove Rebecca to an airfield the following afternoon. The image of little Dania waving goodbye stayed in Rebecca’s mind. Dania was a good kid. Bec’s arm was wrapped in a skilfully applied sling. A bottle of painkillers in her pocket.
A small plane rolled out from a hangar as Bec and Salim arrived. Salim shook hands with the pilot, gestured for Rebecca to hop in the plane, then said farewell. Rebecca thanked him one last time and from there her flight made its way towards Tokyo.
The drowsiness of the painkillers had made Rebecca groggy by the time they landed at a private airport somewhere in Japan, where a car was waiting to collect them. The pilot guided the plane into a hangar and left it in the care of a Japanese associate working there, then led Rebecca over to the car and opened the passenger door. She blinked rapidly to clear her head as she climbed inside.
Then they were driving again, into the sprawl, towards the colossal complex of Tokyo city. Darkness enveloped under city layers and skyrises. Once again neon lights swapped out the stars and the car slowly pushed through the nightlife of the city. Then the car rolled to a stop outside a shabby restaurant. The first character on the sign outside flickered and buzzed. The warm night air smelled of fried food and liquor.
The phone in Rebecca’s pocket buzzed: round back.
Again, she followed the instruction. Rebecca accidentally stepped in a puddle, the splash surprisingly loud in this sudden quiet space. Then a hand reached out and yanked Rebecca into a small room, another hand covered her mouth before she could scream, and Kelly Jade stood inches from her face, urging her to be quiet.
‘Didn’t mean to scare you,’ Kelly said, letting Bec go.
‘Kelly!’ Bec didn’t know if she felt angry or relieved. ‘What the fuck! What’s going on?’
‘I’d ask you the same thing. Sato Yamasaki contacts you on a dark server and you don’t think it’s worth mentioning?’
‘I couldn’t,’ Bec tried not to sound like she was pleading again, ‘not until I had proof that I didn’t break the immunity deal, not really.’
Kelly gave her a suspicious look.
‘I still don’t have proof,’ Bec went on, ‘but you have to trust me, please. I know how it looks, alright. Sato used our encounter to set me up as a mole so you wouldn’t go looking for the actual leak.’ She raised her hands in a gesture of innocence. ‘You didn’t arrest me after the helicopter crash which means some part of you believes I’m telling the truth.’
Kelly turned away and pinched her brow in thought.
‘I don’t know why I disobeyed my orders. If you’re not the mole then how did Sato know we were coming?’
‘I have a theory about that,’ Bec hesitated. ‘It was Mikah.’
‘Your friend?’
Bec didn’t want to believe that Mikah had betrayed her, but like Kelly he wasn’t the type of guy who refused orders from his employers, even if they happened to be Nexus Rogue. Bec knew how he justified it, too. He thought she was a prisoner, Nexus Rogue promised to help her out. He would have done it for her.
‘Yes,’ said Bec. ‘When I was back in Perth accessing my memories for information, I was asleep for at least an hour. He infected my phone, it wouldn’t have been hard – I mean, he helped me build it.’
‘And the phone?’
‘Lost it in the crash.’
Rebecca took a moment to look around her. She suddenly felt exposed, even here, hidden in a back alley.
‘So, what now?’
‘We get someplace safe.’ Kelly started walking towards the street.
‘It’s not like we can go back to HQ.’ Bec tried to make it sound like a joke but Kelly didn’t laugh.
‘I have some contacts with the Yakuza, they’ll help us.’
‘Old friends?’
‘Something like that. They’ll be able to keep you hidden from Nexus Rogue and the UN, that’s our main priority.’
‘Who knew I’d ever be so popular.’
This time Kelly cracked a half-smile.
‘What about the rest of the team?’ Bec went on. ‘After the ambush?’
‘Everyone’s alive, a few injuries but nothing serious. Whether or not we can rely on them for help – I don’t know. Akira, maybe. Connor and I go way back. Boris and Yuri would be harder to sway. I think we should keep our distance for now.
Bec nodded. ‘Right.’
She popped another pain pill. Kelly took out her phone and made a call. Somewhere in the distance, echoing through the forest of skyscrapers, sirens. This wasn’t going to be easy. As from this point forwards they were fugitives.
They met up with Kelly’s Yakuza contact under a tree at the park. Kelly and the contact spoke to each other in Japanese for a while, he handed Kelly a set of keys and an address then disappeared into the night. Kelly punched the address into her GPS and headed towards the new HQ. They arrived at a high-rise, their new headquarters nothing more than a small apartment.
‘Bit of a downgrade, isn’t it?’ said Bec, checking out each of the rooms.
The lights shut off as she returned to the kitchen where Kelly sat at the table with her laptop. Rebecca joined her and took out her phone. She couldn’t exactly type with her left arm in a sling so her phone was the go-to piece of tech for now.
Kelly received a phone call and went into the other room to take it, then returned two minutes later and said, ‘There’s been an attack. DOS hit Shibuya.’ She transferred a video file to her computer. ‘Take a look.’
The screen displayed what was undoubtedly one of Hiroshi Inoue’s digital afflictions, the virus tore through the city’s electronics like a hailstorm, an entire suburb taken over in the blink of an eye. It seemed that Nexus Rogue intended to make the technology of the masses unreachable.
‘Any word on Sato?’ Bec asked.
She watched glitches pulse through building-sized billboards while drones, serving droids and security bots went haywire.
‘Disappeared,’ said Kelly. ‘I think he’s trying to prove a point. He’s saying: look what I can do. Question is, how do we stop this?’
‘I have some tools that could help break his hold over the public tech.’
‘Let me guess—’
‘At HQ.’
‘Bec, the taskforce swept your bunk, all your things have been confiscated.’
‘Not this – it’s on a thumb-drive hidden in my mattress, with some of my other stuff.’
Kelly seemed impressed. ‘Well, looks like being careful paid off. Let’s just hope it’s still there.’
Kelly stood up. Bec stopped her.
‘Wait, you’re going to get it now?’ said Bec.
‘It’s not like you’re in any position to go. And we need it, don’t we?’ She gestured to the images on her computer. ‘I should be able to use all this chaos to my advantage.’
‘Okay, just…’ Rebecca caught her hand. ‘Be careful.’
The NR virus occasionally messed with the internet but it was often an easy enough fix. Rebecca eventually determined that this was not actually a direct attack, it had no specific target, the whole thing was uncontained. There seemed to be no order or classification to the technology infected or the speed at which the virus spread, which meant that the first thing Bec had to do was figure out how this problem was getting around, a frustrating task when the internet was either completely disconnected or moving at the speed of Internet Explorer. She ended up laying on her bed and waiting for Kelly to come home.
After a while, someone knocked on the door. Rebecca sat up and grabbed her gun.
‘Who is it?’ she called.
‘Pizza delivery,’ Kelly replied.
Rebecca let her in and said, ‘Did you just make a joke?’
Kelly carried a paper bag.
‘Okay, here’s the thumb-drive, your spare laptop and apparently your Snickers bar.’
Rebecca had forgotten about the Snickers bar. During her time at HQ someone kept stealing her chocolates so she resorted to hiding them in her room.
Rebecca retrieved the USB. An anti-virus was the key to stopping what could potentially be Nexus Rogue’s most devastating global cyber-attack yet. Bec knew enough about the AI-virus from when she worked for Nexus Rogue. Maybe she could develop an anti-virus capable of detecting and eliminating Sato’s upgraded version, then all she’d have to do was upload it to a cyberspace nexus point that would enable it to spread across the globe, hopefully within a couple of hours, if not a day or two.
She sighed. This task would be easier said than done, unfortunately.
‘I have news regarding our other little situation,’ said Kelly. ‘The UN put you up on the target board as an accessory to NR’s crimes. Congratulations, you're officially wanted in 193 countries.’
‘What about you?’ said Bec with a guilty look. ‘You’re not up there too, are you?’
‘I’m labelled M.I.A.,’ Kelly replied. ‘The team have their suspicions, especially Boris, but they’ve made no allegations, and there’s no proof that I’m helping you. As far as anyone knows I went dark after Afghanistan.’ She looked at Rebecca working with one hand on her computer. ‘So, what do we do with that anti-virus?’
‘We fix all of our stuff, for starters – make sure we’re no longer vulnerable.’ She looked down at her left arm in the sling. ‘This is gonna take a while. I need your help. Once I finish here, I’m thinking we send the anti-virus to the rest of the team. We can trust them, with this at least, I’m sure of it.’ She looked out the window as the city lights flickered on and off. ‘There’s someone else – Jackie. She works for a tech company in London. She’ll know what to do.’
Kelly gave her a cautious look but Rebecca stressed her point.
‘She’s not like Mikah. She’s legit. And she’s probably the only other person I trust right now. They help us find Sato, maybe we can turn his own weapon against him.’
Rebecca allowed herself just ten minutes of zero-gravity heaven where she closed her eyes and let herself drift away, slowly spiralling across the vast nothingness of outer space. Something about the oxygen system, she thought, inhaling it as if these were the last breaths she was ever going to take, and the silence of the vacuum, true peace and quiet that could never exist anywhere else in the world. When Rebecca opened her eyes, she looked out the window of the spaceship in which she had deactivated the artificial gravity. She was alone and floating above her bed, admiring the scenery, the great sun eclipsed by an ice giant, rays of light piercing into space.
Then, Kelly floated next to her, but Rebecca didn’t know when the captain had jacked in.
‘Hey astronaut,’ Kelly said, turning upside down as if she were in slow-motion. She raised her eyebrow.
‘I read that anti-gravity sims can help you think,’ Bec explained, putting her hands behind her head.
‘And?’ said Kelly.
Rebecca shrugged. ‘Doesn’t really work, but it feels nice.’
Kelly kicked off the wall and floated across the room.
‘You’re right, it does feel nice. Anyway, you’ll never guess what I just found out.’
‘Sato Yamasaki’s home address?’ said Bec.
‘Next best thing. Emily Song is hiding out somewhere in the city, one of Akira’s friends just linked me a tracker connected to Song’s phone.’
Rebecca directed her body so that she was sitting upright when she switched the gravity back on. She fell to the bed and Kelly landed on both feet on the other side of the room. Bec looked up.
‘Do you think Emily Song will point us towards Dimitri? Maybe they’re both hiding here. We could knock out two birds with one stone.’
Kelly nodded. ‘First thing’s first, we have to bring Song in.’
They both jacked out and Rebecca sat up in her bed and removed the VR Immersion device. Kelly sat next to her and glanced at her arm in the sling.
‘You can’t go like that,’ she pointed out.
‘Well, it’s not like I can unbreak my collarbone.’ Rebecca stood up, went to the table and picked up a low-weight tactical visor they’d recovered. ‘I’ll fix this up. It’ll give me a feed while you’re out there. Tech support, you know.’
Kelly checked her phone and looked at the blip that marked Emily Song’s location within Tokyo. She looked at Rebecca.
‘I’ll be counting on you.’
Kelly threw on her jacket. Ideally, she should have found the right attire for a night out in Tokyo but there was no time for that now. Fortunately military pants were in vogue right now. Lastly, Kelly collected her pistol and stepped out the door.
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