Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

those bulky, ruggedized, shock-resistant OtterBox cases, which means even if she misses it, the device will almost certainly be fine. The worst thing that can happen, she hypothesizes, is that someone in a neighboring exclave will witness what is undoubtedly suspicious behavior, call security, and Quinn will find herself in a holding cell until Moretti or Van can spring her. That, or her phone will slip through her fingers and ricochet off her forehead, coming to rest in such a way as to capture her subsequent supine repose having just recorded one of the most hilarious memes in all of internet history.

Quinn opens the camera app, swipes over into super slo-mo mode, taps record, and…launches. Her hands are up over her head with her fingers spread into as much of a basket as they can form as she tracks the phone’s ascent. There must be a stiffer breeze up there than there is down at sea level, as the phone’s lateral travel is more than she expects, and she takes a few steps toward the edge of the platform to try to stay beneath it. But when its path intersects with the dazzling glare coming off the glass, she loses sight of the device and instinctively transitions from trying to catch it to covering her head to protect herself.

A moment passes, and then instead of feeling the impact, she hears something heavy ring the platform railing followed by a sickening, delicate gulp. By the time Quinn can get down on the mesh flooring, thread her arm through the rail, and reach for her phone, both it and the skeleton key it contains are already well on their way to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

—

Of course, she holds it together while she’s alone on the exclave’s dock; it isn’t until she is back on the ferry and surrounded by other passengers that the tears start to flow.

Quinn has lost track of the number of times this investigation has made her lose her shit. But it’s different this time. It is not sadness or loss or fear. This time, it’s anger. At herself. For being so fucking stupid. And it’s embarrassment because she’s clumsy and fat and couldn’t keep her marriage together or keep her daughter safe and can’t catch this man who murders babies, and she probably isn’t even in the right fucking country anyway, and by the time she gets her handset replaced and waits for another digital certificate to be issued she will have lost at least an entire day. And lost time in this case is not paid for in waste, but in human lives.

A new handset is not all Quinn will be requesting when she gets off the ferry, buys a prepaid burner handset, connects it to her metaspecs, calls the CIA’s global field emergency hotline, provides the classified passphrase, requests a callback from Alessandro Moretti, and finally humiliates herself by explaining what happened. She will also use the opportunity to—

Wait. Her metaspecs.

She can’t use them to call Moretti or Henrietta, since they rely on her handset for a secure data connection, but she might be able to use them to review some of the footage. Files are seldom explicitly moved around now; instead, devices use predictive modeling to try to anticipate when and where data will be needed. If Quinn’s handset thought she might want to watch the footage on her metaspecs, it might have moved at least part of the file over before the connection was severed.

Quinn could probably do everything she needs to do through voice commands, by tapping and swiping against her metaspecs’ capacitive temples, and by flashing hand gestures like nerdy gang signs, but she already feels conspicuous enough, so she digs the keyboard out of her purse and unfolds it.

The file system browser doesn’t surface anything new, but some of the data could still have been transferred in chunks. Quinn toggles on hidden objects, navigates to the system cache, and is rewarded with promising timestamps: multiple randomly named files that total several gigabytes in size.

She starts with the newest bucket of bits, and there it is: the nausea-inducing quake of found footage. No sound, though. The audio track is probably one of the other files, but video is all she needs.

She taps the spacebar to pause, then uses the arrow keys to advance. As the main level of the exclave rotates into frame, Quinn starts to feel significantly less moronic. Landings aside, her plan seems to have worked. She uses keyboard combinations to draw out and position a rectangular area of interest, holds down the control key, and slaps “plus” to blow it up. While she doesn’t have the resolution she needs to read labels, she can see that the kitchen counter is covered in little white plastic bottles that she recognizes from her dieting days as liquid meal replacements.

Quinn momentarily clears her metaspecs so she can see where they are (only about halfway back to the ferry launch), then mentally begins enumerating:

First, order a new phone. With a skeleton key preinstalled. And demand that someone hand-deliver it to her. In Doha. Today.

Second, take a Dragonfly back out to PLC—with or without budget approval. And this time, do not knock. Henrietta found schematics of the exclave and informed Quinn that it is one of the few with a basement, which is almost certainly where Naan and Pita have retreated.

Third, confront the twins and demand their cooperation. She no longer has any doubt that they will be able to identify her man.

She is about to kill the video when she makes the connection between her sinking handset and the exclave’s basement. Another rap on the spacebar and all that registers are flashes of glass and steel and sky, and then it instantly slows down and everything goes blue. She’s not sure if it’s because of the OtterBox or because of the handset’s optics, but the footage is surprisingly clear. Quinn can see the undulation of the sun passing through the