The Transporter's Favor by C.M. Simpson (pride and prejudice read .txt) 📕

wouldn’t like to come home with me?” he asked, and he was only half in jest.

“You’d need to ask Rohan. Dog’s not mine to share.”

We looked around, and I pulled out the company schematic.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think you’re wasting time,” Abby chimed in, and dragged us into the Sharovan server, and through a link into the Dark Net that existed beneath it.

Beckett was shocked.

“That’s not supposed to be there,” he murmured.

“Sorry, sweetcakes, but it’s something one of your suspect agents built specifically.”

“He did?”

“She, and yes, but I’ve yet to find the communique that suggested it. I am hoping we’ll find something wherever this leads to…”

We turned a corner in the tunnel, and Cascade leapt suddenly ahead. Before Beckett or I could react, the dog had crunched his way through a half dozen small attack programs set to defend the storage space at the end.

“Jackpot,” I whispered, scanning the area for any more defenses, and not feeling safe enough to relax when I found none.

“I’ll take this corner,” Beckett said, shifting to a suite of files opposite where I was standing.

“Whoa! We should have really asked where we could exfiltrate these to,” I said.

“I’ll take them,” Abs said, and opened a conduit to an isolated storage section inside her ship shell.

“I didn’t know you had this on board,” I said.

“Well, it’s not like I tell you everything, hon. Need to know, okay?”

“And, right now, I need to know, I get it.”

“Here, Abby,” Beckett said, waving a file in the general direction of her presence.

She took it.

“Jackpot, indeed! Nice work, Agent Beckett. I’ll log this with Delight, straight away. The rest we’ll strip and store. It’s more evidence of the connection, but it won’t give us Costoganzi’s location.”

“Done,” I said, transferring files as fast as I could. “You want us to leave copies, in case they come back?”

“No, just drop a sticky and an alarm. I’ll leave a tag trace. If anyone comes here, we’ll know, and we’ll know exactly where to find them. No matter where they run.”

It sounded like a plan, and we stripped the files, and the hidden folders behind them, in nanoseconds.

“Now, we just have to find Costoganzi.”

“You got a picture of the man? Or a signature?” I asked. “We could try to find a match in the correspondence coming in at the top of Sharovan or Mishamblin… maybe…”

It was worth a shot. Abby surfaced into the legitimate web and pulled the most recent press picture she could find. I passed a copy to Beckett, and felt Cascade’s sudden attention.

“You want a copy, too, boy?” I asked, and passed his net presence the file.

“Wuff,” he said, snuffling through the bits and bytes, as he ate the entire image.

Well, at least I knew he could be fed in the digital….

“Wuff, wuff,” and he bolted into the ether.

“Abby!”

She didn’t reply, but I caught a glimmer of her presence charging after the dog’s net construct, Beckett following in her wake. I hurried after them, but this was the part of retrieval I hadn’t specialized in. I could do the research, but high-speed pursuit of net presences through the web? That was the sort of shit I left to the IT bunnies. You know, the ones with teeth.

I just uncovered the data I required to locate what I needed to fetch, and then I physically went in and fetched it. This whole ether-net bouncing thing was something I just didn’t do.

“Quit your whinging, Cutter!”

Abby had returned, and she grabbed me and towed me through the web to where Cascade was dancing around the locked and bolted net entrance to a very private server. I sighed, and looked at Abby and Beckett.

“Let me guess, we earn a penalty or three for being identified?”

“Not yet, we don’t,” Abby snapped back, “but you need to convince him to head back home, or we’re rumbled, and then we won’t be able to get you to where this server sits in the real, before he leaves it.”

“Cas, time to go, boy,” I said.

He scratched at the door, whining as he tried to dig his way through it.

“Cas. Good work, boy. Treat?”

That got his attention, and I tried to work out how to get back to the Wanderer’s server.

“I’ve got this, Cutter,” Abby told me. “Grab the dog.”

She stretched out a digital hand.

“Beckett, grab hold. I don’t want to leave you behind.”

The Sharovan agent didn’t argue. He took Abby’s hand, and let her bring us all the way back to the Wanderer’s isolated machine. Delight was waiting for us when we surfaced.

She didn’t look too impressed—and neither did the six Hack Team members who’d surrounded our terminals and were staring at us in frustration.

“You had a bit of an unfair advantage there, Cutter, between the HMT and the dog.”

I felt my face flush with color.

“I didn’t know Cascade could do that.”

Delight’s eyebrows rose.

“You mean that’s new?”

“Not all of it, but he was more effective this time. Maybe it’s something he’s growing into?”

That seemed to mollify her. She looked over at her team.

“No harm. No foul,” she said, “but I’ll look into the files we got from Ghoul, and see what we can do about finding you folks a puppy, each.”

I caught the mixture of emotion that ran across the faces of her team. Everything from absolute delight to horror at the idea of having a pet.

“They don’t become useful for a couple of years,” I ventured.

Delight shrugged.

“From what I just saw, the wait will be worth it.”

She reached into my head, and tapped Abby on the shoulder.

“I’ll want a copy of those files,” she said. “All of them.”

“Just let me sort through them, first,” Abs said, but Delight shook her head.

“You pass them over as soon as I give you a path.”

“Fine.”

Abby sounded put out, but that was the cost of leveraging Odyssey’s help, and she knew it. How were we to know they’d be paying such close attention?

“You should have,” Pritchard murmured, and I knew he was right.

“I promised Cascade a treat,” I said,