Steal the Demon: A Science-Fiction Novella by Robert Roth (free novels to read txt) 📕

herself. With her father’s absence and everything that meant, Kimiko needed to make a new name for herself. Not literally, of course. She’d already done that when she jettisoned her identity as Kimiko Hitomi and transformed herself into Kimiko Yanaka, taking the name of her mother’s family and giving up the well-deserved reputation that she’d always traded on before. Kimiko knew she could earn it back. She was still a kick-ass pilot. But to do that, she just needed the one thing she no longer had access to–a ship. Given her dire financial straits, she realized that there was only one way to get one. She would have to steal it.

That was why she sat alone in the bland, corporate, Confederation-run lounge on the edge of Davida Station. It was nothing like the dirty, friendly, hole-in-the-wall, dive bars that she frequented back on Ceres, but it was the only option that an uptight, straitlaced place like Davida Station had to offer. The lounge was crowded, at least, which helped her to blend in. And it was noisy enough to confuse most listening devices, which enabled her to maintain her operational security. Unfortunately, it was also prohibitively costly, which was why she’d been carefully nursing the Pavonis Mons Genuine Martian Whiskey sitting in front of her while she waited to meet with a notorious hacker called Paradox.

She knew very little about Paradox, besides what she’d heard about and read on the Net. She felt a strange kinship with them, since they also had a reputation for being one of the best, or rather one of the most notorious, due to their prodigious and high-profile hacking activities. Everyone had heard about the Confederation Data Bureau’s firewall breach, after all, not to mention the infamous Erebus Station hack. But the rest of Paradox’s identity, including their appearance and their real name, was mostly a collection of wild guesses and complete unknowns.

To say that she’d been mildly surprised when Paradox agreed to meet with her would’ve been an understatement. Being on the CSG’s Most Wanted List understandably led them to become something of a recluse. But, when Kimiko left Paradox a message at the secret Net address her cousin Kenji had dug up for her, she’d actually gotten a reply the very next day, and eventually, an invitation to meet with them in person. She was even more surprised when they’d agreed to meet with her at Davida Station.

It could’ve been a set up by the CSG or some former rival of her father’s, meant to entrap her so she could be sent off to join him on Callisto. But it was worth the risk. She had very little left to lose, at that point, and was honor-bound to act, anyway. So, when Paradox sent her a private, encrypted message link, she accessed it. That first message from them had really set the tone for their relationship.

Which ship would you like my help to steal?

So much for operational security. Had she been setting up a smuggling run, Kimiko would’ve spaced the whole mess then and there. But her smuggling runs had been done with parties that were carefully vetted by her father’s organization, and they were little different than regular cargo shipments–mostly just quieter and more out of the way. And she’d never before directly engaged the services of an elite hacker. The closest she’d come was with one of Kenji’s ex-boyfriends, and he hardly counted. She still didn’t trust Paradox, but wasn’t ready to jettison the whole exchange after the first message, so she sent them a cagey denial in reply.

But it’s obvious, Paradox had responded. Then they sent a detailed log of all the Net searches Kimiko had done regarding the Al-Zamani Shipyards that shared Davida Station’s orbit, digging for whatever scraps of information she could find to build her plan, a little bit at a time. I’m a hacker, not a shipbroker, they added. If you’re looking to buy a ship, you’ve got the wrong individual.

She shouldn’t have been surprised by that. Any hacker who could waltz through the AI-powered security of a firewalled CDB server would obviously have no trouble looking at her Net data. But it still stung, especially after the effort she’d made to hide her tracks. Kimiko tried imagining how her father would’ve dealt with it, burdened with all of his complex rules about honor and propriety. He probably would’ve felt just as spun out as she had at having her motivations laid bare so early in the negotiating process. She was nothing if not her father’s daughter, after all. Deep down, she knew she was just embarrassed. Perhaps he would’ve been, too. But she had no reason to be, and she certainly didn’t need to be concerned with saving face. Why would someone like the infamous Paradox trade messages with her only to insult her?

So Kimiko told him which ship she had in mind. Then Paradox asked her what her plan was, and she told him that, too. It terrified her a little, committing her plan to some kind of record, no matter how private and secure it was. But it also felt good having a co-conspirator. She hadn’t realized how much she missed having a team of some kind to work with, especially her old crew before her father’s arrest. And for whatever reason, Paradox seemed interested in being on her team. She asked them if they would help and, if so, how much they wanted to be paid.

I definitely want to help you, Paradox replied, then suggested an oddly specific figure. After looking it up, she confirmed that it was precisely a third of the creds stashed away in her account on Ceres. Apparently, her bank’s security was no match for the hacker, either. While it would be a big chunk of money to part with, it was obviously something she could afford, and she couldn’t help feeling like they were letting her off easy–maybe even giving her the bait and switch.

She didn’t want