Chapter 31

“Turn around!”

Reading that, Jeff took off in a run and ducked around a corner, his heart thumping and his lungs burning for air. He hadn't noticed the sender, and had assumed such a short message was from one of the anonymous contacts he had worked with since arriving in Punta Arenas. Working alone, he would never hack each of the parts he needed in time, and instead turned to his network to pull together every trustworthy person willing to implicate themselves. He was so desperate that even unskilled help was useful, bringing in people who just had to run programs they were handed and keep their mouths shut about it. A large number of the people he was working with belonged to an anti-rig protest group, who formed after the loss of their countries and land, and who had more experience avoiding legal interference than he did. When he had received messages from them before, he hadn't dared to sit around waiting to see what he was supposed to be running from.

After he calmed down, he realised that the phone he received the message on was his ordinary one, not the secure one that they contacted him on. Only then did he realise just how crazy that made him look. The message had been from Sam, and he could see her standing not far from where he had been. It was easy to recognise her, as her short height and childlike features seemed almost comical compared to the professional clothing she tended to ware. The stunted growth was definitely the side effect of Sleepless, the drug that Sam used to avoid having to ever sleep, which prevented most people from getting started, that and the lethal risks of stopping.

In the several months since he last contacted her, he had been too busy to notice that they hadn't talked. His network got him transferred to a parts store in Punta Arenas that was a common hangout for people like shady designers and programmers. The off-brand parts that were sold made sure than every money-strapped pilot in town knew where to find it, while their no questions asked policy on buying designs to register made them a popular place to distribute hacked parts. That place turned out to be the perfect place to set up, as he pinned bounties on the wall for the parts he wanted and resold the parts that were brought in to fund the bounties. Through doing that, he had collected discount versions of most of the parts that were being used in the new generation rigs.

The problem was, however, that he didn't have all of the parts. There were a few critical pieces that were apparently being designed in the Kaya household itself, and no one had managed to crack in there. That was why he was at the airport; he had been told that there would be an opportunity to break the Kaya network passing through. While he hadn't been told what it was, he had been told that it would be obvious when he saw it. Seeing Sam, he knew what they had in mind. If she was in Chile at that time, then she had to be headed for the Quadrennial Games, and if she was headed there early, then she was travelling with a rig; Sachiko Kaya's rig, at that. He just needed to infect that rig, and when whatever upgrades Alicia tried to install are uploaded, he can just have it send them to him. He still had the transmitter file on hand, since he had used it a lot lately, so it wouldn't take much time to upload to the rig once he was near it. The security programming would normally take a little time to bypass, but he wrote the code that Sam used and included a way through it.

He did feel a little bad about always going behind her back, but justified it to himself that she would never know, and that if she was really ready to be a mechanist, she would spot his breach before it activated. The kind of stunt he was planning was actually fairly common amongst competitive level rig matches. With land and resources at stake, sabotage was an obvious thing to attempt. That was why every mechanist worth the name, at least at a professional level, made a model version of the code they were going to install, as well as the version that was going to be implemented in the rig. If the difference between the two was too great then it was likely that something wasn't building correctly; which either meant badly made parts or sabotage. That wasn't always the case, sometimes there was simply just a lot of faulty formless particles, or incompletely deleted old code, and that resulted in a false error message. In that case, it was still advisable to replace the particles rather than use the rig equivalent of rusted parts.

As Sam started to look for him with a confused expression on her face, he used a crowd of people to slip past her and went down the other direction. Rigs were stored in a particular section of the airport whenever they were transported. It was a barricaded section designed to try and divert an explosion away from important parts of the city. They design was never very effective, but they were mostly built for alleviating fears. The way that rigs were transported did make the general public feel more secure about travelling with a potential nuclear weapon, but they also left them vulnerable to sabotage. He sent a message to one of his accomplices and waited for a response. If things went the way he wanted, the airport security would have been sent a secure message with a government identification telling them to have a camera malfunction for a few minutes.

Once he was sent a message confirming that they were down, he casually walked into the storage area. While dressed like a mechanist, and walking with the confidence of someone who was supposed to be there, he walked up to Sachiko's rig without anyone there bothering to check him, especially not the security who were in the middle of looking the other way. Any of the baggage handlers would have just seen him as one of the many people who had already run a diagnostic, running yet another diagnostic. Any of the security staff, would just see someone from the government doing something shady for the good of their country. When the diagnostic was complete and the extra commands were embedded, he walked out of the room as casually as if he were paid by the hour. Moving back to the waiting lounges, and taking a seat at a bar table, he sent a message to end the security blackout.

A few drinks later a lot of familiar faces met up with him there, interrupting him while he worked at compiling the gathered parts. Not only was Sam and Diana there, but Savannah was also with them, practically a giant when next to the two shorter women. Without giving him even the option of refusing, the three of them sat at the table with him and signalled to a waiter for drinks to be brought over. Diana started talking the moment she sat down, seizing all momentum as she forced everyone along at her pace.

“The mission was complete on my end, but I can't help but notice your side is lagging behind.” A smirk filled her face, one that was both mocking and playful and she continued, “If you want to send poor Sav out there half equipped then you can just say so and I'll set her armour up so that it breaks apart for you.”

With that remark, Savannah seemed a little worried. Diana hadn't been her mechanist for all that long, and her personality did leave the possibility that she would actually do that. She trusted her mechanist entirely, but also doubted her in equal measure, mostly in regards to state of mind.

“I've automated the last of the data I need,” Jeff reassured her, barely looking up from his laptop and drink, “so you'll have the last design before the start of the expo.”

Sam was the only one who didn't know what the three of them were talking about and alternated between them, looking for someone to tell her. In the end Diana gave a laugh and said, “Your partner's family isn't the only one unveiling a new generation. If this slacker gets the designs to us on time, the games will be a lot less one sided than the Kaya's would like.”

Following that, the conversation deviated from work, and they instead started to catch up with each other, avoiding talking about anything work related like an unspoken rule. Though the topic of rig parts did come up, it was spoken of more in terms of gossip than performance, as each of them had little in their lives outside of their work. After a while, Jeff and Savannah's flight was called and they left Sam and Diana behind. As they boarded the plane, he sent Sam a message.

“From what I hear, the beach on the west side is a popular place for first timers.”