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

“And that’ll be the end of me,” I grumbled. “Not gonna happen today.”

I reached into my bag of dirty black hacker tricks and tapped into a zombie botnet I’d had on the back burner for a couple of years now. A quick-and-dirty script added all three thousand computers in that botnet to the attack on the raiders’ system, and a warm, happy feeling spread through my chest as I watched billions of port requests slam into my target like a swarm of torpedoes into the hull of a defenseless cargo ship.

“Are you there?” a woman’s voice whispered from the holographic display. “Lord Rathokhetra, is that you?”

A shadow obscured the webcam’s view for a moment, and then a woman’s blurred face appeared on the hijacked terminal’s display. Her eyes were the same vivid emerald green as those I’d seen in my dream just before the orc nightmare had so rudely shoved his pistol into my mouth. The spicy perfume I’d smelled earlier intensified and tickled my nostrils with its exotic mystery. Just like in my dream, those eyes melted my brain and made it almost impossible for me to think about anything else.

“Who are you?” I whispered back. My babysitters hadn’t noticed this new weirdness yet, but I didn’t want to draw their attention from whatever had happened outside the clean room. “You need to stop this attack on DECS, like, immediately. These guys aren’t your run-of-the-mill corporate security goons. This is a cartel network. They will kill you if you don’t knock it off.”

While I thought it was an extremely generous gesture on my part to warn this chick off her attack against the worst people I’d ever met, it was not an entirely selfless move. If I talked her into shutting down her system, I’d get out of this alive.

“Cartel?” she asked, and another scream caused her to look over her shoulder. Had the orc’s friends already found her hideout? Shit, I needed to finish this before the hitman killed all the enemy hackers and denied me my bounty. Before I could plead with the mystery woman on the monitor to knock it off, she turned back to the camera. Her face was still out of focus, but there was something else wrong with its outline. Her head had a strange shape, and she seemed to have horns on top of it. “You mean the Raiders Guild?”

“What are you even...” I let the words die out. This hacker was clearly insane. She’d never see the sense of what I’d told her. I would just shut her down the old-fashioned way.

I’d kept the port scan running the whole time, and it kicked up some delightful bounty. The barrage of attacks I’d launched had overloaded the enemy system’s defenses and knocked more ports open. My AI reported that several of these were network storage devices, a couple were routers, and the rest were a rat’s nest of general-purpose computers.

“You have to complete the ritual, Lord Rathokhetra,” the woman pleaded with me. She pulled back from the camera as some noise attracted her attention, then stared back at me with those mesmerizing eyes. “Please. The dungeon raiders are killing us all!”

The static cleared for a moment, and mystery girl’s face was in full focus for the first time. My heart skipped a beat at my first glimpse of the enemy hacker.

Her eyes were far too large and burned with an emerald intensity that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Three tawny stripes of short, sleek fur swept back from each of her plump cheeks like a tiger’s stripes. Her nose had an upturned tip that was a vivid pink, and her lips were full and blood red. And those things on top of her head weren’t horns; they were pointed ears covered in fur the same color as the stripes on her cheeks. Her skin was a deep bronze that seemed to glow with vitality.

I didn’t know how it was possible for my dream girl to have intruded on my job, and I didn’t care. I wanted her to survive this. I wanted to meet her when all this was over. We could retire to a nice tropical island somewhere without acid rain and bedbugs. Hell, I’d even take the bedbugs if she was part of the package deal.

“Is this some kind of joke?” I choked out. That got the orc’s attention.

“You have eight minutes left, hacker,” he spat. There’d been no further screams, so he’d turned back into an asshole.

“This is no joke,” the cat girl whispered. She had hunkered down so close to the monitor her face was lost in shadows. She reached forward to wrap her hands around either side of the device as if she were trying to clasp my cheeks. “We need you, Lord Rathokhetra. Awaken from your slumber and save us!”

Her eyes burned into me, and I felt a desire to save her from whatever the hell was happening to her. There was something about the woman that plucked at my heartstrings, despite the fact that we were on opposite sides of this fight.

“Are you Kezakazek?” I blurted out.

“No!” she exclaimed, her face twisted with shock. “Kezakazek is leading the attack on your tomb! She is the one killing your faithful wahket.”

That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Maybe we weren’t enemies in this battle after all. Maybe we were both getting dicked over by this rogue band of hackers. Even if the cat girl was nuts, she might have information I could use.

And I really, really wanted to save her.

“How do I complete the ritual?” I asked.

“You must open your Ark, my lord,” she whispered. “But hurry, there is little time.”

I launched a search for file names or directories with “Ark” in the name and crossed my fingers. My heart pounded in my chest as the seconds ticked away. If I followed this