“They’re saying you’re aiding and abetting known criminals. That you helped fugitives evade capture. Don’t worry, I scrambled the signal to your cellphone; they can’t trace it.”
“Thanks, Vulcan. How did they know I was meeting Grim?” Drake says almost to himself. “I thought we were so careful. I definitely wasn’t being followed to our meeting place.”
Vulcan’s fingers pause over the keyboard.
“I can answer that.” He pulls up a different window, displaying what looks like phone logs. “Hang ten,” he tells us.“Interesting. You made a call while you were at the Training Academy.” He glances my way, and I nod.
Then I groan. “Let me guess: they traced it back to Drake.”
“We should have thought of that,” Wren says.
He keeps typing, going from one window to the next, scanning the information.
“It looks like Mainland Security found a stolen SUV the day before yesterday with your fingerprints all over it, Grim. They traced it back to the Training Academy and pulled the call log. Once they made that connection, they started watching you, Drake. When you left in a hurry earlier today…” He opens up another screen. “They had a surveillance drone follow you out to the meeting point today. The combat team maintained a safe distance behind the drone’s signal. That’s why you didn’t pick up on a tail.”
“Fuck.” Drake scrubs a hand over his face. “I should have known. I should have been more careful.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Wren tells him.
“I should have—” Drake starts, but Vulcan cuts him off with a sharp whistle.
“We’re in,” he announces. “Data extraction complete. Let me see what we’ve got here.”
The room goes silent except for the clicking of Vulcan’s keyboard and the hum of his equipment.
“Okay,” Vulcan mutters, scanning through files. “Okay, okay…there it is. Video file from the timestamp you mentioned. But…” He frowns, leaning closer to the screen.
“But what?” I snap.
“The file is corrupted.” Vulcan pulls up the video properties. “Looks like the larger file size, combined with the impact damage, caused some data fragmentation. The file headers are intact, but the actual video data stream has errors. Crap! This sucks ass.”
Disappointment hits, and I make a groaning noise, squeezing the back of my neck.
Wren makes a small sound of distress.
“No,” I say. “Shit! All of this has been for nothing.”
“They’re going to win,” Wren says. “We can’t let them.”
But Vulcan just grins. “Relax. I said it was corrupted, not unrecoverable.” His fingers are already moving again. “I’m going to run a video reconstruction algorithm. It’ll parse through—”
“How long?” Drake barks.
“Not long. This type of corruption is actually pretty straightforward to fix.” Vulcan’s brow furrows in concentration.
A progress bar on one of his screens fills steadily, and then a new window pops up showing that the video file is intact and playable.
“Got it,” Vulcan shouts.
“Can you play it?” Wren asks.
He does, and it’s all there. Every damning second of it.
“That’s them,” Wren whispers. “That’s what happened.”
There’s a sharp knock at the door. We all freeze.
“Vulcan?” a voice calls from the hallway. “You in there?”
