Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

had passed. My head throbbed, and my pulse pounded in my ears as I waited to see if I’d get lucky.

***PLEASE ENTER LOGIN CREDENTIALS.

***>>>

“Holy shit!” I shouted and immediately regretted my exclamation.

The cartel’s gunmen jumped at the sudden sound and drew their weapons. Their eyes were like hard chips of flint as they burrowed into me, and every gun in the room was pointed at my head.

I lifted both hands off my keyboard and slowly turned in my fancy office chair to make sure they could all see I meant no harm. When they eased their pistols back into their holsters and crossed their arms over their chests, I finally spoke.

“Geez, jumpy much?” I asked with a cool-guy tone that I hoped masked my nerves. “That was just me celebrating the stupidity of the bad guys. They made the same mistake your dipshit IT guys did and didn’t defend themselves very well.”

“Twelve minutes,” the muscle said. “In twelve minutes, you’re either a billionaire or a corpse. Your choice.”

“I’ll only need five,” I said with a cocky exuberance that smoothed over the jangled snarl of barbed-wire nerves in my belly. “You did kidnap the best, after all.”

I spun back around to face the terminal and fired off a port scan. My eyes widened as I realized the attacker’s system had no firewall of any kind. I didn’t have a good user ID or password, and there was no time to run a brute force attack on them. But the port scan showed me that these dummies had left several ports open. Those would give me an angle of attack.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here.” I scrolled through the open ports. Port eighty-eight? That was probably a security camera. This could be interesting.

I accessed the open port, and a janky webcam interface of a type I’d never seen before opened in my terminal window. Someone had overlaid a crusty low-res sandstone texture across the whole thing and added an ugly drop shadow to make the words and text-entry boxes look like they’d been carved into the fake rock.

“How very late twentieth-century GeoCities of you,” I grumbled.

One of the first things you learn as a hacker is that people are terrible about their own security. I typed “admin” and “password” into the appropriate boxes and tapped the enter key.

The interface flickered for a moment, and then a red ACCESS DENIED message flashed across the screen.

I changed the user name to “Admin” and tried again.

“Bingo,” I whispered as a green ACCEPTED banner flashed and the sandstone blew away with a surprisingly realistic animation. Static flickered on the terminal’s screen, but my monitor held a black square where I’d expected the video feed to appear. I wondered for a moment if I’d stumbled onto an ancient and forgotten security camera tucked away in an old basement storeroom. That wouldn’t do me any good at all. I needed to see some faces or at least some populated background scene to narrow down the attackers’ location.

The camera’s terminal window fuzzed out into gray and black static that slowly resolved itself into a recognizable image. The ambient lighting in the camera room was dim, and the walls looked like they were made from blocks of stone. The perspective seemed strange, and shadows stretched and shrank across the wall. It took me a few moments to realize the camera wasn’t aimed at a wall. It was pointed up to the ceiling.

Apparently, I was not going to catch the break I so badly needed.

The faint scent of cinnamon and other spices I couldn’t identify wafted through the clean room on a hot breeze. Other scents—hot wax, the faint sulfurous aroma of a spent match, and the warm, thick smell of honey—filled the room in a perfumed cloud.

“Check the doors,” the orc who’d kidnapped me barked, and one of the overgrown muscle men hustled out of the room with his gun drawn.

“I’m going to need a raise if this gets shooty,” I said to the orc. “Hazard pay.”

“If there’s shooting, you’ll probably be the first one to catch a bullet,” he responded. “For now, concentrate on fixing the problem.”

“Wow,” I said. “You’re a fucking peach.”

I dragged the camera’s window up to the left corner of the holographic display and focused on the terminal window through which I’d launched my attack.

I might not have found anything useful through the camera’s naked port, but I was inside their network now. That gave me the opening I needed to crush them.

I set up a quick script to grab the attacks the bad people sent at DECS and boomerang them straight back to their source. That flurry of attacks would overload the camera’s connection. If there was a god in heaven, that downed node would spread its pain to the rest of the network and melt the enemy attack into digital goo.

“Ready or not,” I said as I executed the attack command. “Here I fucking come.”

A high-pitched scream ripped through the room. The muscle boys ducked for cover and trained their weapons on the door their buddy had recently headed through. The chief orc clapped a hand on my shoulder as he positioned himself between my seat and the doorway.

“Keep working,” he said. He might not have liked me, but he put himself right in the path of any bullets that might head my way, and he did it without hesitation. “You will not die until your deadline is reached. You have my word.”

The other two gunmen took that as their key to put their bodies in the same path. They were assholes, but they were assholes with the dedication to lay down their lives in the line of duty. I had to respect that.

Especially when that duty was to keep my fat out of the fire.

The redirected assault pounded against the attackers’ network, but that did not stop the raiders already inside the DECS system. Kezakazek and the other unauthorized users were clawing their way closer and closer to the main data cores at