CyRun - Chapter 9

Gabe held the rifle firmly in his hands as he crept down the grated staircase, which lead down directly to the storage area. He didn’t know how many people were down there, but he could hear plenty of talking and people walking. 

His back still to the wall, he took a quick peek. No one saw him, but he saw more than enough. There were several shipping containers right in front of the stairs. He counted seven guards, all armed as the one outside. Four playing poker in a table right in the middle of the place, one standing near a small room on the corner, and the last two standing near the exit, which was closed with a metallic security door. None of them knew he was there, and were about their normal duties. If they knew something was wrong, they weren’t showing it.

They were all wearing street clothes, and he could tell none were wearing any bullet-proof vests of any kind. He didn’t know if they were arrogant, stupid, or careless.

Gabe closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had to make a plan, after all.

He opened his eyes. He knew what he had to do.

Noticing that none of the guards had noticed him, he took a grenade out of his bag, and went down two steps until he had the whole place in wide-open view. He nodded to himself, took the pin off, and threw the grenade at the table.

By the time they saw it, it was too late. The grenade exploded dead center in the table. The four men were blown away by the explosion. Limbs, sparks, and blood flew into the air.

The men began shouting and running. Gabe didn’t lose any time and fired his rifle at the two guards near the security door. The had barely managed to raise their guns. One was hit in the chest four times and ended with his back against the wall. The second one was hit in both the chest and the legs, falling to the ground. Both died on the spot.

Two more men came out of the small room in the corner, pistols out and ready. The three remaining guards located Gabe and fired at him. Bullets ricocheted behind Gabe. He gritted his teeth and jumped from the stairs to the container in front of him, firing his rifle. He missed all shots.

He dived and rolled, avoiding the guard's bullets. He reached for safety as he fell between the two containers. 

Sparks and bullets flew next to him as he checked his rifle. The bullet chamber had exploded. He grunted, shoved it inside the bag, and pulled the shotgun out as fast as possible. Hearing someone running in his direction, he popped out from cover and fired.

One of the guards was hit right on the chest, sending him flying backwards. Another guard aimed at Gabe and fired. He missed. Gabe didn’t. Half of the guard’s face was blown off as sparks from his aug exploded.

He tried to shoot the third one but the shotgun jammed. He cursed his luck as he hid behind between the containers again. The other man get running towards him, shooting wildly. Gabe put his gun back into the bag and pulled the pistol. 

He ran to the other side of the container and around it. The other man was about to reach it, and didn’t know he had changed positions. He jumped out from his hiding spot and opened fire in mid-air. The guard turned and fired once, but missed. Gabe hit him. 

The guard was hit several times but refused to go down, his shirt stained red. Gabe stood up and kept firing as he walked towards him with haste. It took ten shots from his pistol to finally bring the guard down. 

Gabe didn’t stop walking. He wasn’t one to take unnecessary risks. He reached the room in the corner. He heard voices inside, desperately trying to call for backup. He took a grenade out from his bag and threw it inside. It bounced on the ball and landed deep inside the room. Someone inside the room screamed. Gabe took a step back. The grenade exploded, and took the room with it. 

Without skipping a beat, Gabe made his way back to the security door and kicked a switch next to it. As the door rose, he ran to the truck Medici had pointed out. He checked the cargo. It was the right truck. He tried the door. It was unlocked. He jumped inside and began to work on the wires below the dashboard. Two seconds and a simple bridge later, the truck started.

He floored it and, in the blink of an eye, was out and merging into a horizontal traffic line. Anyone else would’ve exhaled, relaxed, and thought it was over, but he knew better. He reached below the dashboard a second time with one hand, the other one in the wheel. It took him longer to find it compared to the one in Medici’s car. They had cross-wired it.

Gabe grunted. He checked the traffic in front and behind him before pulling it off. Like clockwork, the truck’s engine shut down and began to dive, fast. He took his hand off the wheel and began to work on the wires he had unplugged. A sweat drop formed on the crown of his forehead, but he ignored it. He tried two combinations and bridges, but they didn’t work. The alarm sounds of the tuck’s insta-comp became louder. The truck was now completely vertical and in a nosedive against the concrete of the slums, if he was lucky. He gritted his teeth as he tried a third combination. The truck’s engine coughed like an old man before coming back on. Gabe wrestled with the controls to straighten the truck. It relented on the very last second before it crashed against the incoming traffic on a horizontal lane. He spun the truck around and stopped, hovering between lanes.

Not wanting to call the attention of any dregger, he merged into the lane in haste before lowering his window and throwing the tracking device away. He then shifted his attention to the insta-comp. Being in traffic already, and carrying a spare, he pulled it off, unplugged it, and threw it away before raising the window. He pulled his spare insta-comp from the bag and plugged it with one hand. It turned on automatically, and a soft-reset later, it was all set and ready to go. 

He checked the systems to see if they hadn’t added anything overly-creative to the truck’s cargo, running a software that came pre-installed to detect any nearby signals. He focused his attention in the container the truck was pulling. The data the insta-comp displayed was unreadable to the untrained eye, made out of what seemed to be random numbers and letters, but he could read it just fine. He smiled. They hadn’t bothered to do anything with the container.  

He allowed himself a brief moment of respite. He checked his mirrors several times to make sure he wasn’t being followed, and he wasn’t. All that was left was to enjoy the ride back to Medici’s building and the sound the almost perpetual rain made when it fell on the windshield. For the first time in several months, he accessed an insta-comp not to do some hacking or improvised programming, but to do something rather mundane.

To select a music station.

CyRun - Chapter 8

Gabe landed on roof a of a construction two buildings away from his target. He got out, bag hanging from his shoulder, and closed the door. The car took off by itself and went away.

He grinned. He wasn’t stupid. Leaving a nicked car full of fingerprints and strands of hair wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do. So, he had programmed it to lift on, merge into a vertical line for a couple of minutes before shutting down and crashing straight into one of the many abandoned towers of the city. 

Of course, every car had systems, pieces of software, lines of ghost coding, and even its own shields to stop that from happening. But hacking them out of the main system once you had access to it was pretty easy, especially for him.

He turned around, ran, and jumped from one building to the other. There wasn’t much distance between them.

He kept running and jumped again, this time aiming at a water pipe at the side of the window old man Medici had mentioned. He knew they were a desperate, almost dying outfit, but they had money somehow. They were terrible at their jobs, rats pretending to be men, but he hoped that the intel was at least better than the old piece of junks they claimed to be ‘guns’ they had given to him.

As he grabbed the plastic tube and put his feet on the wall to hold himself in place, he heard some footsteps down below. He looked down. There was a man walking around, armed with a simple straight-action Koshki rifle and some grenades. He did not recognized the outfit, but he was definitely no dregger. They were too proud not to wear their police grab if they were doing such a thing.

If he had noticed him, it didn’t show. The man kept walking under his own stop until he turned the corner and disappeared view. 

Gabe focused on the window. It was right next to him. He took a peak and saw a straight, wide hallway with blue walls and fake blue-ish marble floors. There were a handful of what seemed to be offices, four or five, with windows and doors leading to the corridor.

His window was in such an angle that there wasn’t anything that stopped anyone on those offices to spot him almost immediately the second they looked at the hallway. There was nowhere to hide.

He inhaled slowly and tried to focus on the sounds around him. The rain hadn’t stopped, and it was a fruitless attempt.

He shook his head. He took another peek in second attempt to see if there was someone in those offices. He managed to at least see that the two farthest offices were empty.

He took a deep breath. He was going to have to gamble it. He didn’t like that. 

He opened the window very slowly, so not to make a sound that might alert anyone around. He exhaled, took another deep breath, and jumped as fast as humanly possible. He rolled on the floor and put his back against the wall below the nearest office window, all in the blink of an eye.

If anyone had seen him, he was wide open to get killed on the spot, or warn every single dregger in miles to make a small game to who could cut his head first. But other than a voice behind him making idle chatter, he didn’t see a thing. He sighed in relief, no one had noticed him.

He wasn’t out of the red yet. He was still in a hallway with no place to hide. He couldn’t afford to waste any time.

He shuffled to his right, careful to keep his head and his brown hair below the window frame of the room behind him. He knew someone was there, and didn’t know if he was looking out or not. He stopped next to the door, reached for the handle, and pulled it careful to make the least sound possible.

There was someone on the other side, he knew that. But so far, the mumbles of chatter weren’t stopping and weren’t reacting to the door being pushed open very slowly by Gabe. He took a quick glance inside.

There was a man inside, he was right. His back was to the window, he was in what seemed to be a call. He was behind a messy cheap plastic desk, and was surrounded by several impromptu shelves full of data disks, papers, and devices with tags on them.

“Yeah man, can you believe this? Fucking bullshit,” the man said. “They force us to use this old piece of shit phones to make all calls, and the doors don’t even have card lockers. It’s insane.”

Gabe grinned. He was right about that.

“It’s a miracle I at least have a computer in this fucking dump. When I joined the force, I didn’t think my post was going to be this crap, I’ll tell you that.”

The man was trapped inside his own personal bubble of whining or complaining. Gabe thought he could’ve even sneezed and the man would’ve said ‘gesundheit’ and continue whining to whoever he was talking to on the phone.

However, he had a job to do. He closed the door, carefully, and went to the other side. He took a glance over the second office’s window and saw it was empty. Good, he thought before putting his bag to his right, opening it up, and pulling a pistol out. He put the safety on, just in case.

He stood up and knocked on the door. “Hold on, someone’s knocking,” the man said before setting the phone on the desk and walking towards the door. He opened it wide. “Hello?” After seeing there was nobody there, “Is this another fucking joke, Carl, because if it is, I swear –“

Gabe smashed the pistol's butt against the man's forehead.  He collapsed and hit the ground with a loud thud, unconscious.  Blood dribbled from his head.

Gabe shook his head as he dragged the man’s body back inside the room, came back for the bag, and closed the door behind him.

First thing he did was tie the man down with the rope from his bag. First the legs, then the hand, then the arms, and finally some rope around his mouth so he couldn’t speak, tightening it up to the point the man’s back was stuck on a u-shape.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he heard someone say behind him with a weird mechanical tone. “Hello? I heard a noise. Bro, are you there?”

It was the phone. Gabe stood up, grabbed it, tear it in half, and throw it on a recycle processor on the wall. No need to leave any means to get outside help to the man, or anyone inside the building for that matter.

He walked back to the desk, pushed the chair aside, grabbed the one-piece PC –monitor and CPU in one- and the keyboard and took them with him to below the desk. He wanted to see what the system had, and by the cables alone he could tell there was an info grid in the building, and that meant there had to be a mainframe of some sort in the building. However, it made no sense whatsoever to do so while giving away his position.

Luckily for him, the man had accessed the mainframe before he had arrived and had left it open. That was good, since that meant that was one less barrier he would have to hack and force himself into.

Locating the right software in the operating system wasn’t hard, especially since that computer –as most computers set in cheap offices such as the one he was back then- ran the cheap and practical Mysis OS. It didn’t take him even one minute to access the codeline prompt, the basis of any system, and before he even knew it, with a few lines of extra codes and some editing of the pre-existing ones, he was in the main grid. The defenses they had set up were a joke, he didn’t even had to edit a single line to get past them. He activated some basic shadow software and edited it on the spot to stop anyone, even grid admins, to look at his moves. Just in case anyone was keeping an eye on the grid itself.

He could see it all, control it all, and most important, shut everything off. The surveillance system, the alarms, their records, everything. He made a copy of everything –and some bank records- and sent it to himself via an automated mail system that ran through several dozen proxies and three shadow hi-code firewalls. Nothing was tracking it down.

Then, with just the press of two keys, all of that data was gone from the grid. Their databanks were empty. 

To make sure they didn’t spot anything, he set all the security cameras to stop recording and to feed a constant five minute loop to the monitors themselves. No one would see him coming, and no one would be ever able to tell he was there to begin with. 

He smiled. Sometimes, it was just too easy.

He glanced over the desk. The hallway was empty. He nodded to himself and butted the PC monitor with the grip of his pistol as he stood up and put it back on its place along the keyboard. After patting away all the cheap plastiglass from his clothes, he reached inside the computer and ripped the HDD off the pcb and put it in his pocket, and for the finishing touch, he reached for the pcb itself and crushed it in half with both hands.

There was no way they were rescuing that computer, ever. 

He dusted the plastiglass dust from his hand, picked the bag from the floor, and walked out of the office, careful not to step on the man he had hit in the head who still showed no signs of being any closer to waking up.

He took one quick glance trough the office’s window to see if anyone had appeared on the hallway yet. No one had. He sighed in relief and opened his bag. He put the pistol back and got the rifle out, knowing that he didn’t have the gear to put the weapons were they should be, near him hands at all times.

He went outside and crept along the corridor and up to the farthest door on the left, the only door that had to lead down and to the storage area, his back against the wall, moving silently, guns held ready.