1.1
In the heart of Jupiter's capital city...
In the darkness of space, no one can hear you. They can't see you. They can't find you. Invisibility had always kept Finley safe.
This wasn't the comforting darkness of space. Lights everywhere forced rhythms of daylight on her. Trains rushed through the skies carrying millions of people and androids from the shopping districts to the food markets, rushing from one terra-corp to another which made no sense to her.
Why did they bother to meet in person when vidscreens worked just as well?
Maybe they didn't value obscurity the way she did. Maybe when your business is legitimate you don't need to hide. But where was the fun in that?
She'd been on Jupiter almost 3 months. 14 different cities. This time she had a place in a posh sky tower and a sleek cityship small enough to skirt around the trains and into one of the thousand docks that surrounded every building. And she still had half a million Jeuls.
Fiery vega she was bored.
* * *
Cade got the message in the middle of the night as he prowled the main deck of the shuttle from Callisto back to the surface of Jupiter. As if night meant anything in the darkness of space, in the void between dayspheres that balanced day and night on the worlds.
It'd only been 4 hours since he sent the inquiry. Which meant his investigator already knew the answer. Or it wasn't difficult to find the person who did.
Why hadn't they done this before signing the Mirrikh deal?
His father was so meticulous in choosing his suppliers; in structuring deals with every agent on Caelderon worlds from miners to suppliers and farmers. He'd even visited Mirrikh's moon and inspected the cattle. Paul-Haan Mirrikh was a skorpios for making this deal, but admittedly a clever one for pulling it off. Cade hated him even more for that.
Cade pulled up the sleeve of his right arm and skimmed his finger over the apps and files of his bioport. Data flashed before him as it played over his optic nerves, until he found the Mirrikh contract. He cast it as a digital display before him, scrolled through the text, flicked out sections once he'd eliminated them, desperate to find a loophole.
* * *
Finley was almost disappointed that Caelderon Enterprises was clean. The vulnerability she'd found in their system was so small, undetectable except to the most sophisticated hackers. And they had so. much. money. It would have been an elegant, massive take, perfectly suited for her.
But all their deals were remarkably fair. Their accounting completely clean. Their employees and partners well treated. And Finley didn't steal from the good guys.
It was only because she couldn't let it go that she walked into Caelderon Tower. The potential was too big; the window in too obscure. She wanted this hack more than she'd wanted anything since she stepped off the Kiarie onto that starstation. And if she wouldn't exploit their vulnerability, she'd make sure no one else could.
Finley breezed past security with her forged credentials. She smiled at people and walked through the halls like she owned the tower. Masking herself in confidence no one would question.
The server hub ran like a beam of light, golden and white, straight up the center of the tower. Glowing veins of multi-colored data streamed along the seamless white absilium walls, carrying data to and from the server core. But she needed the service port at the base. The temperature dropped a few degrees with every floor as the lift descended toward the sub-levels until she shivered. Finley pulled her favorite black jacket out of her back pocket, released the hyper-compression and put it on. It would have been an extravagance if she cared about money; the ultrathin material 1 of the latest inventions from Mars. It fit like a second skin, kept her body temperature level in extreme cold and absorbed basic weapons fire. She'd bought it, though, because the style matched her favorite pair of boots.
Finley tied her dark hair back as the lift stopped. She stepped into the frigid hallway and gave herself 2 seconds to watch her breath curl. Then 50 seconds down the corridor to the hub. 10 seconds around it to find the right port. 45 seconds to plug in and upload the program that would shore up the vulnerability she'd exploited.
"You're welcome," she said to Niall Caelderon 110 stories above her, king of the Caelderon empire. Of course she could still get through with the keycode she embedded in the program.
58 seconds back around the hub and down the hallway to the lift.
No guns. No alarms. It was the easiest incursion she'd ever managed. She slipped the jacket off and tucked it into her pocket as the lift rocketed above ground and up to the main floors.
She had no way of knowing that those 2 minutes and 35 seconds would change her life forever.
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stay tuned for new episodes january.2025….