Cypher: Chronicles of Rah Read online

  CYPHER

  Chronicles of Rah Novella

  Scott Hopkins

  Copyright © 2017 Scott Hopkins

  All rights reserved.

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  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Epilogue

  About Scott Hopkins

  Other books by Scott Hopkins

  Connect with Scott Hopkins

  Dedication

  To Mark: For giving me the encouragement to find my own voice

  Chapter One

  Well that’s different! I normally wouldn’t think anything about being in a dark room while trying to sneak in and steal corporate secrets, except in a situation where I didn’t turn off the lights. That tends to make me pause and take stock of the moment. The darkness wasn’t unwelcome, but it was a surprise, which meant I had to stand and let my eyes adjust to the subdued lights of the city outside the thick-paned windows. This can’t be good, I thought to myself. The lack of light in the hallway outside the office was also driving that knot in my gut to tighten as I fought the feeling that somehow I’d betrayed my presence. My ears and eyes focused on every little noise around me, searching for any sign I was in trouble.

  As I moved through the office, with each step deliberate, the only noise that seemed out of place was a very dull oscillating thrum of vibrations in the air. The rather spartan décor of the office drew a smile as I thought about the rather buxom blonde executive who owned the office. When we met, she came across as a hard-charging female who had worked her way up the Megacorp ladder. Seeing her office, it dawned on me that individuals who tend to be rather aggressive like that don’t need a lot of things. She had been very passionate, vivacious and hungry, and I had played on that to get what I needed from her. On some levels, I hated leaving her in this position, but business is business, and everything else was a means to an end.

  I crept my way to the large white ferroplast desk sitting with her back towards the corner between panes of glass on either side. I couldn’t help but smile again, thinking how the placement of the desk was perfect. It sat in a position of power in the room, with the backdrop of the city stretched out on either side of her, where she could intimidate even the hardiest client.

  The oscillating thrum grew louder, holding my attention for a short second before I turned back to my quarry, the safe in her desk. The design of the desk seemed curious in that there were no obvious creases or edges. The sleek desk felt hard and smooth as I ran my fingers along the surface, looking for an imperfection or blemish. There wasn’t any need to search the drawers or files. What I was looking for wouldn’t be in a pencil cup or file folder. It was something that the company wanted very much, and had gone to a lot of time and trouble to get.

  Gotcha! My finger ran across an imperfection: a plate along the inside edge of the desk, imperceptible to someone not searching for secret doors. With a light touch on the pad, a quiet click signaled victory. I smiled as a drawer at the bottom of the desk slid open, revealing a lighted keypad. I tapped the key code, which I had coaxed from my blonde executive, into the colored squares on the keypad. I was rewarded with a friendly hiss of electric gyros as the thin metal plate holding the key pad slid back into the drawer, revealing a clear crystal cube.

  I stared for a moment at the perfect symmetry of the cube before sliding it out of its slot. I couldn’t help but hold it up in front of my face, letting the lights from the city below refract through the lattice of circuitry inside the crystal. I admired the tranquility and beauty of such a development.

  They called it Cypher, a DNA-locked organic data crystal formed from organic material and innovative technology, which harnessed more storage or processing power than any current computer system. It was no wonder the company wanted it acquired.

  I needed to get it out of the building. As I admired the crystal, a random flash of light reflected across its face, a sweep of red light from under the door. I guess it doesn’t pay to turn out the lights if I can see you coming, I thought to myself as I considered my options. I had to laugh at special tactics teams who failed to realize that technology they used as advantages tended to work against them with intelligent prey.

  I slipped the cube into a felt pouch and dropped it into the pocket in my jacket as I looked around the room. One of the downsides of having such a minimalist décor in an office, I thought to myself. Nowhere to hide.

  When I saw the second set of red lights sweep the hallway under the door, I figured it was time to come up with a good plan. I also realized that the oscillating thumping had grown even louder, vibrating along the glass.

  My mind searched the sparse room; I spied a small black table sitting at the end of a long white couch near the large pane window. An idea came to me as I remembered that there was a secondary rooftop just a few feet below the office window. This had been what I was trying to avoid by coming in at night. I hated to use my ace in the hole so early in the evening.

  My “ace in the hole” was a genetic modification developed to make me more successful as an operative: the slice and dice of Androken DNA and other chemical changes in my body gave me a few enhancements to make me a better spy. The most exciting being the ability to exude special pheromones that can alter a person’s mood or perceptions. My control of these pheromones is acute, and I have learned, through years of training, to focus them and influence the emotions of others by doing so and even at times to erase myself from notice. It takes concentration to start and control in order for it to do what I want, and in the end it can be very poisonous to my body, but if used right, it could be very useful.

  Realizing I had mere seconds before the soldiers busted into the room, I focused my thoughts on what I wanted to happen. My body began producing pheromones as I pushed the couch and the small table as hard as possible toward the window. The furniture slid across the smooth tile floor, smashing against the thick plate glass and broke through with a raucous crash. Almost on cue, three soldiers wearing black tactical gear and black goggles over their eyes hurried into the room. As they moved through the room, small automatic weapons were trained in front of them, their piercing red lasers sweeping back and forth as they moved.

  I had to move careful, the pheromones radiating out from my body would distort their perception, but the range would be limited. I used the darkness to enhance the distortion they perceived. Sudden movements created shadows that would cause them to look harder. If I did it right, the pheromones fooled the soldier’s minds into believing I wasn’t there and I could walk right past them without them seeing me. Two of the soldiers moved straight for the hole in the broken window. The third moved toward the desk, checking the empty safe and looking for clues.

  "Pickup One, this is Lead.” The voice from the trooper in command filled the room. “Subject has dropped to secondary roof on west side of complex. No visual, need eyes on."

  The two men at the window searched the roof below for signs of life. The third man drew very close to where I was moving along the long glass window; to
my chagrin, his attention was on the desk and not on the “empty” room.

  After what seemed an eternity, I reached the door. Looking back, I realized the thumping vibration in the air was an airship approaching the building. The craft hovered along the outside of the building, a bright searchlight pushing the darkness away.

  I smiled as I realized the three men were more focused on the window than on the possibility that their quarry was sneaking out the door. I ducked into the hall, reached the stairwell and descended the stairs, keeping my ears open for the possibility of pursuit or someone coming up the stairs.

  After making it down three flights, violent shudders shook the building and almost threw me down a flight of stairs. I held on tight to the rail as I looked up through the shaft toward the source of the blast. Darkness overwhelmed the stairwell as the lighting flashed out. Emergency lights flickered to life, filling the stairwell with an eerie white light that illuminated the heavy dust and smoke.

  The look of shock on my face would have scared the most hardened operative, had there been anyone in the stairwell with me. Are they launching rockets at the building to flush out an invisible thief? I wondered as I continued my descent.

  Whatever caused the building to shake threw the company’s personnel into a throng of chaos as scientists and executives scurried to escape the building, while security and damage control personnel fought to get into the building.

  The chaos in the lobby worked to my advantage, allowing me to slip out of the building by blending into the crowd. Fire teams and security personnel set up a perimeter around the building to push people back, but failed to corral the building personnel. I couldn’t help but smile as I slipped into the night, the sirens and flashing lights creating a kaleidoscope of sound and color on the surrounding buildings.

  Debris and ash drifted through the sky from the top of the building, a burning ruin of mangled metal sat in the middle of the street inches from the edge of the building’s shattered office windows. I looked up and with a gasp, I realized the floor of the building I had been on and everything within about five hundred feet was gone. Missing. Destroyed.

  My only reaction was a sigh of relief at the realization that the floor below the office had been a reinforced research lab, which contained the blast and kept it from sweeping through the stairwell.

  I took a moment to thank my lucky stars that things turned out the way they did, then I faded into the crowd, with my unremarkable features working in my favor. I walked for a time, taking the opportunity to process what had happened and how things had gone so awry. My walk was aimless for the most part, carrying me far enough away from the building and hopefully random enough that I hadn’t been followed. When I looked up, I found myself down the street from a local netrunner interweb café. I needed to rest and coordinate a drop for the item, but my mind was racing at how the plan had been literally blown to bits.

  One of the advantages of being an operative in my business is the cool gadgets they give you. I pulled a small crystal from my pocket and slid it into the associated port. The clear crystal screen flickered to life at the base of the console as holographic representations formed above. Manipulating the floating icons with my fingers, I logged onto the interweb, then the crystal automatically directing me to the necessary website for the communication I needed to make.

  To the outside observer, the site looked like a forum in which users could meet people for all manner of things or sell items. I found the appropriate page related to my missions: “Lonely souls looking for it all.” The company used it to contact my handler for missions, and he used it to send me the details in an encrypted thread. I scrolled to the bottom and began my reply to let them know the job was done.

  Crystal Goddess: Stopped for a bite in the Relard District. Found what I was looking for but got more than I needed. Hope you like shiny things. At our usual spot tomorrow, you bring the wine and I’ll bring the glasses. - Blackknight

  I read back over the language before I posted the message. It wasn’t a perfect way of sending messages, but it was clandestine enough that no one would expect anything. During missions, the responses tended to be relatively quick, since my handler stood by and watched for trouble. There was no reason for me to suspect this mission would be any different, so I leaned back against the ferro-plastic chair and rubbed my eyes as I waited for a response.

  My first order of business as I waited was medicine, Promium to be more specific. A medicine designed by RendarCorp to counter a number of blood-borne illnesses, including the side-effects of my talents. While mixing my DNA with Androken DNA brought about a number of useful abilities, and while these abilities allowed me to influence emotions and perceptions through an acute control of an advanced form of pheromones, increase my sense of curiosity and give me an intense awareness of my surroundings, my enhancements also created a side effect that could kill me if I wasn’t careful.

  The genetic splicing managed to create a constant battle inside my body, much like trying to give a human a blood transfusion from an Androken. While Androkens may look humanoid and genetic markers similar to humans, they are most definitely feline in nature. Just as a blood transfusion between a human and a cat would not normally work, daily injections of Promium were necessary to diffuse the immune reaction of my blood. What starts out as relatively minor symptoms – dizziness, tiredness and disorientation – tends to spiral pretty quickly into more life-threatening symptoms like septic shock and death if not treated.

  The limiting aspect of my talent was that as I used it, the level of reaction increased exponentially. Promium kept the toxic levels in my blood from rising too high. While I’m certain that the company created dependence to this drug as a means to control their operatives, that didn’t change the fact that I still needed to have a supply close by or I would die.

  I pulled the small cylindrical auto-injector from my coat pocket and pressed the tip deep into my inner thigh. There were many places on my body I could inject Promium, but directly into one of the major arteries tended to speed up the process considerably.

  I sighed as I felt the injection spread through my body. The weakness and fog in my mind slowly subsided. I had to admit, I was starting to feel rather old for my age as the adrenaline of the evening wore down and the Promium reset my body. I’d been running espionage missions for almost ten years, and this was the closest I’d come to being caught. One would think the life of a corporate spy would be all parties and alluring women.

  That assumption, though flawed on many levels was not completely wrong. While my looks and size tended to make me unremarkable to most being someone who people tended to forget easily had become a great asset when stealing secrets for my employers. I had been too small to join the Republic as a soldier, and I didn’t have the political connections to be in the Republic Intelligence Corps. Thankfully, the right looks, along with the right DNA, meant that the glamorous life of a freelance spy was in the cards for me.

  In this world where Megacorps and governments controlled everything and stealing your competition’s secrets was a form of politics, a nameless, faceless agent could be a valuable asset, working behind the scenes to drive policy and advancements over rival corps.

  Lost deep in my memories over the last ten years, and letting the Promium do it’s work, I realized that almost an hour had passed. I checked the activity logs using the software on my crystal. Still no response from anyone, which was a bit puzzling. The meeting time and location had already been set; the message was really just a way to let my handler know to coordinate the drop. While a delay in responding was odd, it wasn’t unheard of, so I logged off, making sure the software on the crystal wiped any evidence of my activity. I figured after a long eventful evening, I should get some sleep before the drop.

  The busy street outside, filled with groups of young adults in skimpy dresses and fancy suits hurrying off to bars or parties, gave me a perfect cover. My natural camouflage, plus the opportunity to mix in with other peo
ple, gave me the chance to hide myself from any surveillance that might be looking for me, as well as get lost in my thoughts again.

  The incongruities of the evening were starting to pile up, forming a mystery. My mind normally enjoyed mysteries, curiosity was one of the side-effects of my enhancements, but they were dangerous for a man in my line of work. No matter how I followed the line of events leading up to this moment, like a rat lost in a maze, I continued to run into walls.. Who were the soldiers working for? They weren’t corp security. How had they known I was there? Had the explosion been a countermeasure, or had the soldiers triggered something? A pit began growing in my stomach as my instincts warned me that something was amiss.

  A torrent of rain bathed the city as I walked, causing me to turn up the collar of my coat. I picked up my pace as people ran in every direction to escape the downpour. My senses were on high alert for anything out of the ordinary, but the rain made the otherwise deserted streets difficult to read. After a time, I reached familiar territory: the neighborhood near my safe house.

  The rain had stopped as I grew closer, my natural tendency would have been to relax and feel safe, yet my instincts tended to be right about situations, and this time, the pit in my stomach grew stronger as I walked up the sidewalk along a large red brick warehouse across from my safe house. This neighborhood was not a place that a lone person should have been wandering at night. I normally wouldn’t have stayed in a rough neighborhood like this one, made up of low-income apartments and abandoned industrial buildings, but my handler thought it would be a nice way to “lay low” during an op.

  I slowed my pace as I approached the corner of the building. A broken street lamp and recessed doorway created an ideal vantage point from which I could scan the street. The deserted street was eerily quiet and devoid of all but the occasional foot traffic, and homeless residents.