"Wynn here. Ravine. Set up behind the boulder formation, fifty meters south."
"Zadie here. Base of the tower with Gideon."
Silence.
Zadie tapped him on the shoulder.
He glanced up and glared at her with a narrowed stare before going back to his computer.
"Gideon," Neve said. "Comms check."
He let out a long breath. "Gideon here. With Zadie." He pulled a cable from the bundle and handed it to Zadie. "I need you to run this from the laptop to the junction box on the east side of the base. There's a service panel behind the access cover. Two bolts—both probably rusted. Inside, you'll find a row of fiber terminations. Third from the left. That's the live feed. Got it?"
"Copy that." She took the cable and moved around the base. The access cover was exactly where he said it would be—a dull gray panel the size of a binder, bolted to the concrete with hardware that hadn't been touched in years. She pulled the multi-tool from her vest and worked the first bolt. Rust flaked under the wrench head, and she had to lean into it using both hands before it gave.
"Opening now," she said.
The second bolt broke free more easily. She pulled the panel and set it on the ground. Inside, a row of fiber optic terminations glowed faintly in the morning light. Tiny pinpricks of green light, each one carrying a sliver of ORACLE's nervous system through the mountains.
A burst of adrenaline shot through her veins. She didn’t know if it was dealing with the tech that excited her. Or that she had a gun slung over her shoulder, and danger lurked in the shadows. Both concepts were the reason she’d stayed in the military. She didn’t have a death wish. She didn’t enjoy getting shot at.
But she had a thing for the rush.
She scanned the area before finding the proper fiber termination. Seating the connector, she felt the click, pressing it firmly.
"Connected," she said. "You should have signal."
"Looking for it now," Gideon’s voice came across comms in a low, controlled tone. "I'm in the stream. Starting the cipher monitor now."
She moved back around to his position and crouched beside him. The laptop displayed four sections. In the upper left was the network traffic. Next to that came the cipher regeneration data. The system behavior logs in the lower left, and the lower right had been left blank. That would populate once enough data had accumulated to begin pattern analysis.
"How long until you have enough to read the pattern?" Wynn asked over comms.
"Depends on traffic volume. Where it is in the cycle. And how close it is to wanting to regenerate." He tapped a few keys. "I need to watch enough cycles to map the variables. It could be twenty minutes. It could be four hours. I won’t know until I see some data."
"We’ve gotten good at waiting," Wynn said.
"Eyes sharp everyone," Neve commanded.
The substation hummed like a beehive. High-voltage lines stretched overhead, supported by lattice towers that disappeared into the overcast sky. The air smelled like dense fog and wet pine. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded the compound, and Scout had cut a section on the north side an hour before dawn to give them entry. They'd parked the vehicles a kilometer out and hiked in through timber dense enough to swallow sound.
Zadie settled against the concrete, hands tight around her weapon, and watched Gideon work. His fingers moved across the keyboard with precision, but every few seconds his eyes lifted, and he checked his surroundings before looking back to the screen.
She’d watch him do that they day Isaac and his men had come for him.
"We’ve got your back," she said.
"I know that."
"You've checked the fence line four times in the last two minutes."
He sucked in a breath, holding it for a few seconds before blowing it out like he was in the middle of a panic attack. "We don’t know when Isaac flagged me during the attack. But he was the one who started that soft scan. He could have had another split AI system holding in the background, watching you."
"It’s possible, but I buried those credentials, and right now, that has nothing to do with this. We don’t have to worry about that until we create the handshake between the software and the hardware."
"I’ve been messing with the telemetry system for two months. Tossing bad data points at it before I got bored with that, and Isaac and my old team got better at finding me faster."
"Is that when you resorted to disabling nodes?"
