Domain code, p.3
Domain Code, page 3
Not that she didn’t desperately want him here with her.
But that desperation seemed reason enough to not invite him into this further. She had no idea what she was feeling, but she didn’t like it. It was like an ache, a physical ache, when she thought about him. Until she understood that a little better, she didn’t want to deal with it.
The quarter-mile walk to Aunt June’s was cold, dark, and miserable. Daelia was having a tough time getting her limbs to play ball; even though it had only been a few days in orbit, all her movements down here felt wrong. She didn’t like it. Not at all.
June wasn’t waiting for them outside, and they didn’t bother with the barn. Instead, Dad knocked on the front door of the little ranch house, and then, finally, there June was.
“Lee,” she said with a nod, and leaned against the jamb. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
“Something’s come up,” Dad told her. “We need to talk. Need your help.”
She gave both him and Daelia a once-over kind of look, then stepped away from the door. “Well, come on in, y’all. Might as well. You’ve come all this way.”
Inside, there was a rare fire burning low in the living room’s small hearth. June bullied Dad right into a chair, pressing a bottle of some neon-colored sports drink into his hands. She bustled around a little as Daelia went over the story, pulling an uncharacteristic hostess routine, until Dad finally caught her by the wrist.
“We need to talk, June,” he said. “About what comes next.”
June looked at him, then at Daelia. “Nothing comes next,” she said. “You, you’re done.”
“I’m not,” Daelia told her.
“Don’t give me that shit,” June snapped. “You think I don’t know what’s going on? You think I don’t care? August has been out, following up leads from Lee’s little—”
“I told August, and I’ll tell you again, June, there’s nothing to find out there.”
June leaned forward over the back of a chair, gripping the top piece hard. “Anything might matter right now.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Daelia said. “That’s why I’m not done.”
“I don’t think you have any idea how much danger you’re in, young lady.”
Daelia pointed at the side of her face. “I just told you what happened here. You think I’m scared of—”
“Don’t tell me you aren’t curious too,” Dad said, obviously trying to redirect the conversation.
June sighed. “About the potential for this to be fraudulent?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, I’ve been suspicious. Nothing Daelia, or anybody else, has found so far has been alien,” June said. “But the idea of anybody lying about something this massive is…”
“Incredibly fucked up,” Daelia supplied.
“Incredibly,” June agreed. “To the point where it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Aliens don’t make sense,” Dad said.
“Most of the planet believes it at this point,” June told him. “Lee, if you’ve been here to see this shit develop…”
He shook his head. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“Who gives a fuck what the planet thinks?” Daelia grumbled. “Something else is going on here and—”
“And what? You’re going to figure it out?”
“Yeah,” Daelia said. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
June sat down. “Okay, I’ll bite. How?”
Aunt June took the news well enough. “You want to hack into Ware?”
“Just the student network.”
“The student network. At Ware,” she repeated slowly. Daelia nodded. “In a system that’s air-gapped? That Omphalos uses as a test bed for its latest security abiota?”
“Technically,” Daelia said, “that’s a separate system that kind of wraps around it, and it’s for student research, not data storage, which is what I need to—”
“Daelia!” June snapped, and then shook her head. “You’re not doing this. You are going to keep your head down and—”
“Twenty-eight people made it off Numina, Aunt June! Twenty-eight, out of three hundred. The abiota up there was using my detector to do it. That makes me connected!”
“It does not make you responsible.”
“Who else is there?”
Dad spoke up. “June, we’re staring down the barrel of that space-lift mission. God only knows what’s going to happen to those people. The sooner we stop this, the better.”
“Come on, Aunt June,” Daelia pressed. “Somebody is faking alien first contact. And the damn government is either in on it or playing along with it.”
“Or genuinely believes it,” Dad added. “Which then begs the question, what’s going on with the Unity candidates? Where are they going? What are they going to do with them? Numina’s offline.”
“You sure about that?” June asked.
“Yeah, pretty sure,” Daelia said.
June sighed. “If the government is behind it themselves, we’ve got bigger problems than what you can unravel on your own, young lady.”
“Aunt June, come on.”
“Lee?” June asked sharply. “You can’t be on board with this.”
Dad shifted against the wall. “If we’re going to do this, we do it together, so we’ve got a better chance of coming out the other side in one piece.”
“What about—”
“I’ve thought about that,” Lee said curtly, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “If it’s related, we’ll fucking deal with it.”
June looked like she’d just swallowed a lemon but nodded. Looked away.
“Related to what, Dad?” Daelia asked.
But her dad wouldn’t meet her eyes either.
June sighed. Crossed her arms. “When were you planning on starting this little suicide run?”
“This weekend is the big annual Halloween event,” Daelia said, taking her aunt’s grudging question and going with it. “You know how New UT goes all out. Everyone’s going to be in costume, the sororities are going to have their haunted house row all up, campus security’s going to be occupied with all the drunk undergrads, and, umm, it’s a reason to go back.”
June seemed to be getting more maudlin by the second. “Dammit. The kugu ghost competition?”
“Tamm invited me back to help judge. It’s an in.” June said nothing. Daelia pressed on. “This doesn’t need to be a super complicated intrusion. I know exactly what I need, and where it is. I just need to figure out what happened to my research. If I can get into the network admin records, I can see who downloaded it, who changed it. All of it.” Daelia realized she was shaking. Angry. “I can find out who’s behind this shit. Or at least, get us a step closer to them.”
“And what are you going to do then?” June asked.
“Anything I have to.”
Aunt June crossed her arms, looking over at Dad. “She is all you, isn’t she?”
“June, this is going to happen,” Dad said. “I’d prefer if we had you on board.”
June closed her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”
Daelia started talking.
5
“Where were you, Dad?”
“Detained. Not my choice, not my preference.”
“Raijinn said it was getting text messages from you.”
“Going through its backups and bolt-holes is on my list of things to do.”
“Yeah, ’cause it’s not like we have anything else going on.”
“You want to do this thing right? This hack? Then cut the sarcasm and work this methodically, Daelia.” Dad closed his eyes, face to the wind whipping off the runway. It was a false breeze, kicked up by the C-17 that was landing. It was the second plane this morning, and the sun was barely up. The Army. Moving in.
Daelia wanted to scream at him. This was obtuse for him. He was normally so direct about things.
“Why won’t you tell me where you were?”
“You talk to Tamm yet this morning?”
“Serket said he’ll be available after lunch.” Accepting his invite was step one in her grand plan to get back into Ware. If she couldn’t make that stick, nothing else mattered. “Dad, come on, stop changing the subject.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Were they not feeding you?”
Dad finally looked at her. “Daelia. Let it go.”
Whoever had been holding him had not been feeding him. Or at least, not feeding him well. Daelia was pretty sure on this point. Dad hadn’t eaten much this morning, and he had a whole box of pills and supplements and whatnot upstairs in his office.
He was drinking tea this morning. Tea. Something from out of that box.
Dad never drank tea.
He’d slept in his office last night too. In fact, Daelia hadn’t seen him leave the Scrap House at all, not even to go say hi to Ginger or Dingo.
The whole thing was just strange. Weird. Uncomfortable.
“Why should I?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Daelia, this whole thing has been—”
But whatever he was going to say, he never finished.
The phone was ringing.
The ancient hardline phone that Dad insisted upon, back inside the hangar, was ringing.
Daelia looked at her dad plaintively. But he just pointed at it. With a sigh, she went back inside to the nearest phone. Picked up the receiver.
“Bellona Robotics,” she said with forced cheerfulness, glaring at her dad, only a few paces away. “What can I help you with on this lovely morning?”
“Excuse me?”
Invite. In-brief. Shit. She hadn’t checked her email at all since she got back. Too preoccupied with all the other shit she had going on. “Umm, right, I’ve been trying to deal with some other stuff here and… umm, can it wait?”
“Why?”
Now Norris just sounded exasperated.
She glanced at the clock. It was past eight already. She didn’t have a whole lot of time. “I’ll try to make it.”
She hung up and walked back out to where Dad was leaning against the hangar doors.
“Who was that?”
“Senior Norris,” she said. “Said something about a brief with the Army. Wants BR there.”
“Norris is a good guy.”
“Dad,” she said more forcefully, “you should handle this. You—”
He sniffed at his tea and poured it out. “Eh, fuck it. There are some things that just aren’t worth it.”
“Dad!”
“I’m in no shape to walk into that kind of fight right now.”
“And I fucking am?”
“Daelia,” Dad said. “Take the meeting. Learn something. Have a good time.” He chuckled, heading back into the hangar. “And close these doors when you leave. Last thing I want is the damn Army eavesdropping on me!”
Daelia brushed some escaping hair out of her face and back behind her ear, staring after him. Angry. She couldn’t seem to shut the anger off right now.
“Fine,” she grumbled, and went to find the UTV keys.
It was strange, walking back into the unit. Like it was any other day. Like her routine hadn’t been disturbed in the slightest. Like everything was fine.
But it wasn’t.
Nothing was right.
She got the impression—from the way Norris met her on the back patio, from their conversation so far—that this was something big. Dad had always been hands-on with stuff like this.
The fact he hadn’t wanted to come was scaring her a little. Even after the weekend she’d had. Even half-dead, she would have put her dad up against any of these people. He was smarter than any of them, and more importantly, he was really good at working the system.
Instead, it was her problem to figure out.
“You saw the planes coming in, I take it?” Norris asked.
“Yeah. They’re just moving them in? All the Unity candidates?” she asked Norris, trailing after him as they headed back toward the SCIF. “Just like that?”
“Yeah, that’s what the feds are saying. Candidates will start showing up on-site once everything’s set up.”
“What is everything?”
“Place to sleep, medical, dining facility, toilets. Security fencing. You know, everything.”
“Is there going to be barbed wire on top of that fencing?” Daelia asked pointedly.
Norris looked at her then, shaking his head a little. It was a clear “not now” signal. They rounded the last corner, the SCIF foyer ahead. “Who knows? Probably not. Everyone’s here voluntarily.”
“From what we’re being told.”
He put his finger to his lips. “The official line is usually pretty accurate, Daelia.”
Like hell, she wanted to say, but held it back. “How can we not know? Isn’t this the Wing’s problem?”
“Technically, NASA has control of that housing facility. We’re playing support.”
“But it’s the Wing’s base!”
“Not right now. And NASA’s not on the base anyway,” he said. The TV in the foyer was set to ChatBot again, Daelia noticed as she stashed her monocle. Lisa and Calliope were ensconced over in the Space Race Coffee at the space terminal. Gushing about their little trip up to orbit, showing photos of some of the exhibits up at Aethera.
Bri Quercitron’s lies.
Daelia felt sick.
“Daelia? You okay?”
Norris was staring at her, the outer security door open. Daelia tore herself away.
“Yeah,” she lied, “I’m fine.”
Daelia and Norris were the last people to arrive.
Always a great way to start out something like this, Daelia thought bitterly.
Hack was sitting at the head of the SCIF’s conference table, right alongside Colonel Kemp, who looked like he’d swallowed a lime. There was some female Army colonel here too that Daelia didn’t recognize, and a lieutenant that she did. Shit, they’d dragged Wyclef over here for this?
Ellington, as a joint base, hosted a number of different units and not all of them Air Force. The 121st Interdiction Wing, under Cactus, had command of the base. But Cactus didn’t have control over the Coast Guard, Navy, or Army troops that were here. The Army National Guard was the second-largest organization on base, a full brigade.
On paper, at least. Eighty percent of the unit was deployed right now over in the Bathtub. The entire command structure had gone, except for Lieutenant Wyclef. In a rare display of compassion for the Army, the commander over there had left the el-tee off that last set of deployment orders. Wyclef’s wife had given birth a month before the deployment, and their extended families had been wiped out in the Five Days War. Wyclef had four-month-old twins at home and always looked exhausted.
Despite that, he was in charge of what few Army personnel were still here. Daelia had only dealt with him a few times, and he seemed like a decent guy. But there was only so much a lieutenant could do. The Amy unit here was now federalized.
Daelia knew enough about the Wing at this point to know it was a situation that would absolutely cause problems.
“Miss Hall,” Colonel Kemp said, nodding in her direction as she slid into the room. “I was hoping we’d have your dad back by now.”
“Yeah,” she said, “me too.”
Hack checked his watch. He had a suppressor over his NULI, and the bulky thing seemed to amplify his head movements. “That’s 0830. Shut the door if you would, Senior Norris? Let’s get this going.”
“You look like hell,” Garcia whispered as Daelia found a seat next to him and the colonels began going over the first of the slides. “Rough weekend?”
“You’ve got no idea,” she grumbled. Unbidden, her thoughts wandered back to Numina’s own conference room, the bodies stuffed in there. She felt queasy.
“You went up to orbit, right?” he pressed. “Was it awesome?”
“How do you even know about that?” she hissed back.
“I’m sorry, Daelia, was there something you wanted to add?”
Kemp. Staring right at her. Daelia wasn’t in the mood for his shit either. Still, the comment had drawn everyone’s attention, and the last thing she—or Dad—needed right now was attention from the feds.
She forced herself to smile. “Not at all, sir.”
“I appreciate you being here,” Hack said generously. “I’m sure you’re tired. That flight back from Aethera is draining.”
Hack was a decent guy. She liked Hack. But she didn’t like the reminder about that flight back. The silence in the cargo hold. Mags, mourning Skoro. The fear, coming in to dock at Aethera.
“Yeah,” she said, “it sucks.”
“If was can discuss Daelia’s trip some other time,” Kemp said sarcastically, “I believe we have an umbilical problem.”
“That’s item three on my list,” Hack said, pointing at the overview slide. “We’re going to talk about that after we address the—”
“It’s not a problem,” the Army colonel interrupted, cutting him off. “It’s what General Sanders was promised. By Base Cyber, I might add,” she said, looking in Kemp’s direction.
Kemp’s expression was condescending. “Tara, I respect your position, but—”
“It’s Colonel Knowles,” she said testily. “I am the commander of this brigade combat team, and as unpopular as this obviously is, I am here with the full authority of—”
“We’re not knocking anybody’s authority,” Hack said with a sigh and a nod. Sergeant Kirby, up front at the controls for the presentation, skipped ahead to the right slide. Tech specs for the umbilical played out on the wall. “I want to give you what you need, but I don’t have a comm umbilical for you.”
