Chapter 29

“Have you seen this before? Any idea what it does?”

Looking at the photo on his phone for only a few moments, Jeff realised that he did recognise the weapon. It made sense that he would recognise it; after all, he had sold it to the kid in the first place. The kid had come into the parts shop a few days prior and said all of the right things to let him know that he was looking for some legally grey, discounted parts. It just so happened that Jeff had the kind of thing he was looking for saved on a data drive, whose identifiable features had been removed, just lying around and waiting to be sold. The weapon’s design was copied from the latest thing a major design firm was working on; so new that it hadn't hit the market yet. It gave Jeff a little bit of sarcastic joy that his copy was being used in a competition before the real thing. That was the gold standard amongst licence cracking hackers.

The weapon itself was a combination of existing technologies, applied in an interesting new way. It took the point to point magnetic field projector of a plasma weapon as the start, and got crazier from there. In its normal use the projector magnetically isolates a line, or that was the simplest way to explain it, and the plasma was shot down that tunnel. This new weapon didn't launch gases however. Instead, it launched sound waves. The waves would be concentrated and contained within the isolated air, with a circular diameter less than a bullet. Any structure that got hit by those waves would be shredded by the repeating standing waves. The destructive beam was also invisible, other than a faint disturbance in the air at certain angles, and it didn't have the energy requirements of a plasma or lightning weapon. But its most devastating effect was what happened when it targeted rigs.

From one way of looking at them, no matter how solid or heavy a rig might appear, it was still possible to describe its materials as a liquid, due to the programmable and fluid nature of the formless particles that they were constructed from. Each cell block that the rig formed knew what it was within the context of the program, such that a rig's hand formed fingers and not wings. That kind of complicated structuring was possible since resonance ensured that each particle knew what it was. That was why compatible resonances between parts and pilots were the most important part of a mechanist's job. But that weapon was something that used resonance as a means of attack, and if a mechanist knew the frequencies that an opponent's rig was utilising, then the weapon could cause the whole rig to melt off of its core. When combined with espionage and hacking, it was a one hit kill weapon against any rig.

From what he had heard, it was unlikely that the lab that made it would get approval to sell it, yet it was already going to be used in a match. “Too bad for them”, he thought with a dismissive shrug. He sent a warning to Sam just saying, “Invisible dangerous projectile” and went back to what he was working on, but now with the live stream of the match in the background. He had spent the last day trying to crack his way into Alicia B. Kaya's servers to try and see what she had cooked up for Sarah Campbell's new rig. As anyone would have guessed, the security around it was just about as tight as it came, but after piggybacking through a handful of less secured devices, he finally had a way in, and just had to wait for the slow process of bouncing through each of those devices to finish his preparations.

The first step was connecting to the head office of a major café chain. From there he followed a link in the network to the franchise that was set up within Alicia's building. One by one, he tested the various people's devices as they connected to the Wi-Fi within that café until he found one that would work; a phone with its own data plan that belonged to someone who worked on the right floor. Jeff then got that phone to connect to the company network using its authentication, and gained access to a formless particle tank. With that, he embedded a secret command that once the particles were used in anything sufficiently large, such as experimental parts, they would divert some of the particles into forming a network transmitter. That way, when the part was plugged into the isolated server that the designers were using, he would have a gateway there to look inside.

About half way through Sachiko's match, he finally had a connection, and by the time her shield was down to quarter power, he had implemented a back-door program that ensured he wouldn't have to follow through the chain every time he wanted to do anything. What he found there was truly surprising to him, and he immediately started to make copies of everything he found. As it turned out, the resonance disrupting weapon that had, just moments prior, shattered the armour off of Sachiko's rig hadn't been developed by the lab he got it from, but instead they had been fed the research by Alicia's company. It wasn't the only piece of new tech that they had distributed like that, either. It seemed that Kaya & Co Pty Ltd. was saving money by having other companies do the risky experiments in their labs. Each of the companies were really only getting a small piece of the puzzle, however, and it was only once the pieces were assembled that her plan became clear.

It was an entirely new generation of rigs, whose performance completely outstripped the prior, and would ensure that anyone who didn't upgrade would unquestionably lose. The marketing files attached listed the price of a single rig as more than twenty times as much as a previous generation model, and countries would really have no choice but to pay it. After all, if they didn't and their enemies did, then they could kiss any hope of winning territories goodbye.

Not wanting to see Alicia profit, he dumped all of the files he collected onto an anonymous file sharing site and spread links to them on technical sites that mechanists and hackers visited. He then made a list of each of the parts he included in the new model and the names of the labs that were making them. Sarah Campbell would be showing off the new rig at the Quadrennial Games, so Jeff had until then to ensure cheap alternatives were available. Luckily, he still had his invitation to the trade show, so he would definitely be there when his plan either succeeded of failed. As he set his plan in motion, he looked at the monitor to see Sachiko strike the winning blow, using her own broken chest piece as a knife to destroy her opponent's weapon then swinging that broken weapon like a club to beat her opponent into submission; like an amazon princess on a bad day. She was obviously in a worse shape than her opponent, with metal fragments from the broken gear cutting her body, but that didn't stop her from finishing the match. With that, Sam's school had won three of five and retained their core.

He attached a link to where he had dumped the files and messaged Sam.

“Congratulations on the victory, but I'm afraid that you've been played by Diana. The link isn't connected to that, but reading it will tell you about that weapon.”