Unity by Carl Stubblefield (epub read online books TXT) 📕

go messing with any settings—I calibrated it so it’s as close to autopilot as I can make it. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll hand the helmet out to you.”

Checking her internal display, they only had thirty-eight minutes left.

“Now or never, I guess. Thanks again.”

Prime nodded as Yuki slipped out the door, holding it almost closed. A hiss sounded and then there was a slight tap on her fingers. Prime passed the helmet out, and Yuki heard Prime’s actual voice for the first time, instead of the digital filter everyone associated with the super.

“Sorry, it’s probably a mess. I never take it off unless I’m alone. You may want to clean it before putting it on,” a soft voice replied. Prime was female. Unequivocally. Yuki stood there processing the revelation as the door clicked closed.

The group of supers slid down the chutes, bouncing as their transports engaged and began hovering. The jet-skies were really called “Psiycles,” since they hovered utilizing some technology that used psi-waves to somehow interact with gravity and weak attraction and repulsion forces to stay aloft. Gus preferred the term “jet-sky” more.

Yuki held onto Tempest, riding double as the three psiycles bobbed as they slid out of the transport, which sped off to await them at the rendezvous point.

Tempest raised one fist upward as they all slowed their bikes, a deep fog forming and becoming ever denser. Pulling in moisture, Tempest thickened the cloud that masked their approach as Yuki readied herself.

They pulled up to the landing and she activated Hack as Tempest maintained the psiycle hovering by the login panel. Since the process was totally automated, she spoofed a delivery request and probed for the appropriate protocol markers while searching for upcoming manifests and deliveries that the facility was expecting.

Yuki pried away the layers of digital defenses until the loading door slid open and they floated inside. A quick search of the factory database indicated some valuable processors and actuators were getting critically low. Stealing these would elicit the highest retaliatory response. She sent the info for the storage location of these items to Gus and Aurora. She wanted those sentries riled.

Gus and Aurora sped off, and Tempest let Yuki get into position before he retreated to await her extraction. A tense couple of minutes later, all hell broke loose.

It was on!

Chapter Thirty

Hack 1/Charlie X

Aurora and Gus flew past Yuki, who waited just outside the loading dock. They were traveling faster than she had ever seen psiycles fly. Sentries of all sizes and configurations followed them like a huge robotic hive had been disturbed, splitting in two and weaving out of sight as it followed the two as they fled in different directions.

Yuki activated all the stealth features of the suit and entered the factory. The facility was extremely basic in its layout. She had to make it to the core, which was, as expected, in the very center of the plant. The brain and heart of the building all in one. As such, all corridors throughout the facility led to it.

Passing the now-empty outer layers, the passageways became crowded as she entered the manufacturing portion of the factory. A couple of times she had to backtrack and get out of the way as large components that took the entire corridor were moved from one section to another, not allowing even an inch clearance on the sides.

The dampening field muffled her movements and it felt unnatural. As the activity picked up around her, the hyper-awareness of silence faded as materials clanked and settled as robot loaders of different sizes and shapes interacted with materials.

Passing deeper into the building, the inner walls, floor, and ceiling were an opaque plastisteel illuminated from within. She continued until she arrived at the mainframe control room. Seeing that it was only a Medusa class G made her smile a bit. At least five years old, her skills should be adequate for this.

Not supernally difficult, but she had no history with Serif or their AIs. That had never stopped her before. She still was a master tester for her father’s firm on the rare occasions she visited home. The programmers were always trying to stump her with difficult AIs in all types of environments.

Automated bots and even the smaller AIs had trouble with extensive lateral thinking, so they were ineffective at hacking bigger institutions. Without the capacity and versatility of one of the prohibitively expensive networks her father offered, they weren’t resilient enough to battle an AI that could adapt and modify attacks against it. It was the primary reason her father’s company had skyrocketed to the forefront of digital security.

Yuki wasn’t just a hacker though, and not just an augment either. She was a super.

Yuki steeled herself for the infiltration. Her hands trembled slightly in anticipation, more excitement than fear. She had been fighting AIs that were prototypes for all the major corporations before she was in her teens.

Never losing a possible advantage, her father had noted her gift with computers early on and capitalized on it. As one of the world’s leading developers of software and artificial intelligence, he leveraged her prowess to catapult his company CyberDynamics to the forefront of AI development, specializing in security.

She had enjoyed it more than any game. When she was “in,” she felt like all her barriers were sloughed off digitally. At first, her father would take time as they reviewed her battle technique, analyzing her methods and tactics to defeat the system. It was the first, and unfortunately only, time they bonded.

It was more than disappointing when the interactions waned and eventually she began reporting to Ludwig, whose all-business attitude made the task feel more like a deposition. Cold, clinical probing and questioning, all the while looking down his piggy nose through those ridiculously small glasses perched on the very tip. It was as if they were designed so that he could look down on others to make them functional.

Despite all that, when she was inside—she was