Chương 185: Laying the Groundwork

The portal deposited them in an alleyway between buildings in a quiet part of the city. Augustus checked both directions, finding it empty of witnesses. He turned to the wall beside him and swept the wand toward it with a flick of the wrist.

"Storage Closet." The door materialized, dark wood against weathered brick. Annie jogged to the vehicle waiting twenty feet down the alley. It was a classic off-road 4-wheel drive SUV. Exactly what Talia had promised. She yanked the rear liftgate up. At the same time, Augustus pulled the Storage Closet door open and stepped aside. The basketball-sized combat drones poured out first. They stacked themselves in the cargo area, before the holo drones, smaller and sleeker, followed.

Last came the surveillance drone, its angular faceted surface catching what little light reached them. Felix bounded past and leaped into the backseat, settling with the enviable grace of a dog. Annie slammed the hatch shut. Augustus closed the Storage Closet door and it vanished, leaving unmarked brick behind.

"I'm driving," Annie announced, already sliding into the driver's seat. Augustus recalled Alexander's whispered warning about Annie's driving, but it was too late. He got in the passenger side, hoping it was an exaggeration. Talia's voice cut across their comms.

"You're precisely on schedule." The engine roared to life. Annie pulled out of the alley, merged into traffic, and immediately started weaving between vehicles like she was trying to set a land speed record. Augustus gripped the door handle.

"The convoy isn't going anywhere."

"Yeah, but we might miss the light." She cut off a delivery truck, accelerated through a gap that barely existed, then slammed the brakes as the light turned red. Augustus took a breath. Alexander hadn't exaggerated. The cross street filled as the traffic continued flowing. A long convoy of identical 4-wheel drive SUVs, tour company logos on the sides, heading toward the desert. Families and adventure seekers packed inside, guides in the lead vehicles coordinating over radio. The light changed.

Annie accelerated smoothly this time, catching up to the convoy's tail end. She slotted into position at the rear, matching speed with the vehicle ahead.

"See?" she said.

"Perfect timing." Augustus decided not to comment on the three violations she'd committed along the way. The convoy rolled through Dubai's outer edges. Construction sites gave way to scattered buildings, then sand. The city fell behind them as they climbed into the dunes, following the well-worn tourist route deeper into the desert. Twenty minutes out, they crested a dune. Dubai's lights disappeared behind the ridge.

"Convoy is maintaining course," Talia said.

"On approach to the next ridge. You're clear to jump in thirty seconds." Augustus readied his wand. Annie eased off the accelerator slightly, letting a gap open between them and the next vehicle.

"Twenty seconds." The convoy continued ahead, oblivious.

"Ten seconds." Augustus held the wand ready, watching the desert rise ahead of them. The convoy began disappearing over the top of it.

"Three. Two. One. Execute." Augustus snapped the wand forward, spinning it through the practiced motion. The portal tore open twenty meters ahead, shimmering. Annie slowed just enough. The portal stabilized, the inky blackness an intimidating wall of nothing. Then she floored it. They shot through. The world shifted, relocated, deposited them in a valley between dunes a hundred meters away. The convoy was gone. Empty desert stretched in every direction.

Augustus scanned their surroundings for movement, but found nothing. Nothing but sand and sky.

"We're good to go," he said. The rear passenger door popped open behind them. Felix, still in golden retriever form, had somehow worked the handle. Drones began flitting over the rear seat, then spilling out of the vehicle, rising into the air in formation. The combat drones remained in the cargo, while the holo drones spread out, ready to initiate their version of invisibility. The surveillance drone climbed higher, already fragmenting into its component units, which began racing away in every direction.

One of Augustus's ethereal hands materialized and pulled the door shut.

"Holograms activated," Talia said.

"I'll update you if anything shows on the feeds."

"Woo!" Annie punched the air.

"Operation Fury Road is a go!" Augustus glanced at her.

"Do I even want to know what that is?" Talia's laugh came across the comms, quickly stifled but genuine. Annie turned to face him fully. Took her eyes completely off the dunes ahead and grinned.

"You're the one that said we have no culture! I even picked a movie that's probably at least as old as you are."

"I walked into that one. Now watch where you're going." Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Annie kept staring at him.

"Why? It's a desert." Augustus sighed. He wanted to argue, but recognized he only had himself to blame. Alexander had warned him.

Talia sat cross-legged in the chair, wearing her favorite fuzzy cat pajamas. Six monitors glowed in the darkened room, displaying rotating drone feeds, network traffic, Dubai news feeds, and scrolling data streams from the quantum supercomputer running its analysis two floors below. A bag of honey-roasted almonds sat within easy reach.

"Okay, I'm through to engineering," Alice said over the computer's speakers. Her voice carried the confident warmth of someone who'd done this a thousand times.

"Patching you in now." The young hacker had been working for her since Alexander found her in new York, spying on Jasmine. Among many others. He'd left her future in Talia's hands. And though what she was doing now wouldn't undo the damage she'd already caused, some people deserved a second chance. A young woman carrying the weight of a sick grandmother, trapped by an organization like AEGIS, might just be one of them. A third voice joined the channel.

An older male, with the cautious tone of someone unsure about why they were being called.

"This is Stevens, lead engineer. How can I help you?"

"Hi there! This is Coordinator Faye, AEGIS Training Division." Alice's tone shifted seamlessly into bright professionalism.

"I'm calling about upgrading one of our speedster training facilities. We've been really happy with the room you installed at our Sacramento site, but we're looking at a retrofit for our newer location and wanted to discuss sensor capabilities." Talia's fingers moved across the holographic keyboard floating above her desk. She'd muted herself on Alice's channel to avoid any mistakes.

"Sacramento." Stevens paused. Keys clicked in the background.

"Right, the full-room setup. That's one of our more advanced installations. What kind of specifications are you looking at?"

"Well, that's what I wanted to ask about," Alice said.

"The Sacramento room handles macro-movement tracking beautifully, but we've got a Tier 2 speedster being reassigned whose whole thing is strikes per second. We need sensors that can capture micro-motions, not just positional data." Talia pulled up Ascended Dynamics's network architecture on her second monitor. They'd spent two weeks mapping it after a successful phishing campaign gained them entry. Now they knew every server, subnet, and connected device.

Between them, the pair had secured their access through multiple vulnerabilities. Even if they discovered the initial malware now, it would take them weeks, if not months, to isolate and eliminate every pathway they'd opened. But she couldn't just attack. This operation wasn't about stealing data or holding the company for ransom. One wrong move, one triggered intrusion detection system, and AEGIS's supplier would initiate a full security audit. Which would cascade and expose everything.

"Micro-motion tracking at speedster velocities?" Stevens sounded interested now.

"That's specialized work. You're talking about sensors operating in the high-kilohertz range."

"Exactly," Alice said.

"I know the Sacramento installation uses your Apex-series arrays, but I wasn't sure if those could handle that kind of granularity." Talia smiled. It was a good non-question. Open-ended. Let him fill the gap.

"The Apex-series caps out around twelve kilohertz," Stevens said.

"For what you're describing, you'd need the Zenith package. Those use the Stellar-9 chipset. Forty kilohertz sampling with sub-millimeter precision." Talia's fingers flew across the controls. She accessed the firmware specifications for the Stellar-9, cross-referenced them against known vulnerabilities. Found three potential attack vectors. Discarded two immediately. Too noisy. Too likely to trigger alerts. The third was perfect. She began crafting the payload. One of the drone feed monitors flashed.

The quantum supercomputer's real-time analysis had found something interesting. Talia glanced at it without stopping her typing. Fresh vehicle tracks in the sand, heading northwest toward a limestone cliff formation. Recently, too. Within the last hour, based on sand dispersal patterns.

"And the Zenith package integrates with existing room infrastructure?" Alice asked.

"We don't want to replace everything if we can avoid it."

"Full backward compatibility," Stevens confirmed.

"The Stellar-9 uses the same data bus protocol as the Apex-series. You'd just need to replace the sensors and control software to take advantage of the higher sampling rates." Talia's payload was nearly ready. She just needed the version number.

"That's great to hear," Alice said. Then continued with casual innocence.

"What's the current software revision for the Zenith package?" Natural. Like she was just confirming compatibility. Stevens didn't hesitate.

"We're shipping with version 4. 7 now. It's really stable. Been running it for six months without any reported issues. I believe we're scheduled to push the update to your existing systems next week." Talia finished the payload and queued it for deployment. Her cursor hovered over the execute command. She popped an almond into her mouth and waited. On another monitor, the network traffic analyzer showed her opening. An automated revision check from one of Ascended Dynamics's quality assurance processes.

Where they performed final checks before the hardware and software packages were shipped out. The perfect cover. She executed. The payload slipped into the network, disguised as a legitimate update package. The infected kit was connected to Ascended Dynamics's automated testing system, mid-calibration. The payload exploited that connection, spreading to every unit in the testing queue. Clean. No alerts triggered. Talia switched her attention to the drone feeds while the payload propagated.

"Augustus," she said.

"Surveillance drones picked up fresh tracks heading northwest. Limestone cliff system about fifteen kilometers from your current position. Analysis suggests within the last hour. Recommend moving to investigate under cover of darkness."

"Copy that," Augustus replied.

"Adjusting heading now." Talia returned her focus to the hack. The payload had deployed successfully across seventeen kits in the current production batch. Once the equipment was shipped out and installed, it would wait, patiently, until it could piggyback across one of Ascended Dynamic's own processes. Whether from routine updates or sensor performance and recalibration checks.

"Great," Alice was saying to Stevens.

"I think the Zenith package is exactly what we need. Can you send me the full spec sheet? I'll run it past our facilities manager."

"Absolutely. What's your email?" Alice rattled off a fake address tied to one of Talia's disposable domains.

"Sent," Stevens said.

"Anything else I can help with?"

"That's everything. Thanks so much for your time!"

"No problem. Good luck with the retrofit." The line disconnected. Talia unmuted Alice's channel.

"Well done, Rabbit. That was clean."

"Thanks!" Alice's relief was obvious.

"Did we get what we needed?"

"Everything and more." Talia began executing the cleanup protocol, erasing logs and covering their tracks throughout Ascended Dynamics's systems.

"Now we wait while those kits ship out over the next few weeks and get installed in AEGIS facilities across the country. Then we finally have a way in."

"Is it really that hard?" Alice asked.

"I mean, I never tried, but still." Talia smiled grimly. AEGIS had some of the best cybersecurity infrastructure in the world. Genius-level hackers on staff. Technopaths stationed at critical network access points, their powers capable of detecting intrusions that would slip past any conventional security system. Air-gapped servers for sensitive data. Rotating encryption keys. Redundant monitoring systems. Going through the front door was suicide.

But hardware sitting inside their facilities, installed by their own people, running manufacturer software they trusted? That was a different story entirely.

"Let's just say the more distance we put between now and when they might detect the intrusion, the better," Talia said.

"You handled Stevens perfectly. The question about backward compatibility was good misdirection."

"He seemed like a specs guy," Alice said.

"Figured if I got him talking about technical details, he'd forget to ask which facility I was calling from." That was smart. Alice really had proven herself useful over the past few weeks. Versatile, too. Still, it would take more than this before Talia could decide if Grimnir should go further with her. But it was progress. On the drone monitor, she watched the team adjust course. Augustus's vehicle angling toward the distant limestone cliffs.

Talia grabbed another almond and queued the next phase of the cleanup operation.