“I’m not sure it’s a she,” he answered. His arms were inside what looked to be the chest cavity, or maybe the power storage, for the modified service drone.

  “I thought you wanted me to find your Marcie files to load.” She hadn’t been able to, but Xero knew she could write a simulation of the NannyBot AI in just a few days.

  Lux shrugged. “I did, maybe I do. This just seems like…”

  “Not like a girl?”

  He looked up at her and grinned. “Yeah.”

  “Like I don’t seem like a girl?” Xero asked curiously.

  “Are you?”

  Smart kid, answer a question with a question. “I am neither… and I am both. Does that make sense?”

  Lux shrugged. “I don’t understand adults. You are Xero, and you’re my friend. That’s all I know.”

  The smile warmed her face. If only everyone could embrace such simple truths, she thought.

  “All right, sir, I have to get to work on the nav computer. Do you need anything before I go?” She had gotten in the habit of helping him solve one problem before she began work each day. Since she wasn’t a robotics engineer, he normally saved the mobility questions for Specialist Otero of the space engineers. He’d learned to mainly hit Xero with systems problems. He nodded eagerly before running through his latest challenge.

  Twenty minutes later, Xero strapped into the command console and began working her way through the system’s submenus. Something about Lux’s challenge today kept nagging at her. He saw things in such a simple way. It was cute, but also in ways, superior to her own approach, which was to assume the solution to a problem would always be complicated and require an exponentially more advanced solution. She’d been in the digital arms race much of her life. One side increased security, the other increased its attacks. It had tinged her view of the world.

  Lux was very bright, potentially very gifted, as his mother was no mental slouch and apparently, the father, too, had many talents. Knowing the boy had survived on his own down on the surface proved to her he had more than just mental aptitude. He had tremendous potential; already he was teaching her new ways to look at things.

  She brought up the command-line interface and triggered the neural link she had installed. It allowed her to literally think about the command coding she wanted to test, and it would appear in the buffer file.

  “Think simplicity,” she whispered. Her problem had been with one central kernel of the command system. It was protected by a constantly changing security encryption that so far had defied every attempt at pausing it, much less getting in. Regaining command control over the related systems like life-support, engineering, and eventually comms, had been time-consuming but simple. This core process on navigation and propulsion was defeating her, at least so far. She’d tried the normal methods, brute force hacks, backdoor maintenance patches, buffer overload exploits, and total system reboots. But so far, no joy.

  What was truly baffling was Xero was confident that she had gotten into the control matrix multiple times only to find herself back on the outside looking in once more. She leaned back in the chair and thought again about the boy. Lux’s issue had been one of ghost sensors that kept giving a faulty reading. It wasn’t one sensor, but many. The hovering drones, which is where many of the parts came from, had to be totally aware of their environment to function correctly. It also had to be able to determine static objects like walls from moveable objects like people. Despite him insisting it wasn’t a system problem, she had helped him recalibrate the array to eliminate the false-positives hits, the persistent shadow of something living that wasn’t there.

  What if it was there? Xero thought before turning around. She could see Lux still busy at his workbench. His mother had brought him a plate of food and was sitting across from the boy watching him work.

  The code slasher turned back to her own screen. “See what is really there.”

  She went through screens at incredible speed, flashing in and out of windows faster than could be followed with an untrained eye.

  “Fuck!”

  She caught it, just briefly before it changed. Something that shouldn’t have been there. A screen exactly like another she had seen before. The two should have been similar but never the exact same. It was a small monitoring sub-routine for the engine maintenance ports. It constantly measured and adjusted cooling, propellant, core containment fields, and such. All very dynamic items, yet the readout had been identical to the last time she’d been here, but only for a microsecond, then it updated. Older buffered systems might do that but not the quantum systems of today.

  She needed to cross-reference to another workstation’s screens to see which was real, but if what she was suspecting was happening, that might prove impossible to do alone. She tapped her cheekbone to make a call.

  “Otero, are you near a workstation?”

  The engineer answered at once, “Of course, ma’am. I’m on the bridge monitoring the final disassembly of the…”

  Xero cut her off. “Please go to this maintenance screen and send me a screen shot.” She rattled off the long index for the right view. “Let me know when you take the shot, I need to get my own timecode just right.”

  “Ma’am, why not just pull it up yourself? You can even emulate any other workstation.”

  Xero ignored the near constant use of the formal gendered term the woman insisted on using. “Just do it, Specialist. I have my reasons.”

  Otero counted down and snapped a screen grab, the same instant Xero froze her own. She used one of the flats linked to her comms to display the image next to her own holodisplay.

  “Son of a bitch. Thanks, Otero. Is the commander on the bridge?”

  “Yes, Riggs is here.”

  Please have her wait for me, I have something she will want to know.

  Xero raced through additional screens, setting up buffers and keystroke generators that continued to generate code as if she was still sitting there. It looked like she was attempting to spoof the ship’s AI. Leaving her chair, she ran over to Lux and his mom who had apparently joined him before going to see Bayou. She hugged the boy before kissing the top of his head. “You’re a genius,” she said before heading to the hatch. Then she stopped. “Cancel the recalibration on the array, Lux. That wasn’t the problem. Sometimes the solution is exactly what it seems to be.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  Bayou stood hunched over the tabletop display in obvious confusion. The view showed a large window with the now familiar orbital trajectory of the IAS Stone Mountain and various smaller windows of more technical data that she was clueless on. “I’m still not following.”

  Xero tried again to explain what she had found. “Lieutenant, do you remember the massive data breach from around ten years ago when Wall Street trading algorithms were hacked?"

  “Vaguely, yes,” Riggs said. “That was before all global stock trading was decentralized and block-chained, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, exactly. I had a hand in locating the code slashers on that one,” Xero offered in way of explanation.

  “Chinese ex-pats hiding out in some renegade, African nation.”

  Xero grimaced. That had been a false narrative her bosses had created to insulate the public from the actual truth, but it wasn’t worth going into now. “Something like that, yes. The exploit the team used was so deceptively simple that no one even considered it. Honestly, the best hacks usually are. Back in the early days of the twenty-first century, they coined a term for the exploits, ‘Social engineering.’”

  Riggs shook her head, still not following.

  “They use your own biases and beliefs to get you to do something… to open the door for them.”

  “But you’re talking about something in the ship’s sensor shadow.”

  “Yes! It is related, I promise,” Xero said, moving around some data screens on the table. “One of the earliest PC hacks involved simply adjusting the alphanumeric characters displayed from white to black. There were no color displays back then, so that effectively turned the screen off to the user.

  “What good did that do?”

  “Well, it could have started a world war. If an enemy state were able to network into a nuclear silo system, they could capture usernames and passwords as the operators tried in vain to login to a system that they were already logged into. The enemy could have even gained direct access to the day’s launch codes.”

  “Oh. Did that ever happen?”

  “No, Bayou, not that I am aware of. It was more a nuisance hack, a prank for the most part, but the idea is still around.”

  “And this is what you found?” Riggs asked. She was still highly pissed at Kovach going AWOL. She wanted Ada working on this, as well as the brilliant hacker, but she was glad the woman… person, was here.

  Xero nodded. “Yes, while the other command locks were all triggered programmatically, the propulsion and navigation are being done in real-time. Someone is putting fake data into our holodisplays to make it look like we don’t have access, when in fact we do.”

  She pulled up the side-by-side images showing the same screens from the two different workstations. “Otero helped me track it down. I then set up a subroutine to make it look like I hadn’t noticed but also began tracking down the signal lag. How fast could the screens update? That gave me a good idea of how far away the hackers were. Perhaps it was someone already onboard.”

  The lieutenant was already sensitive to potential security issues from all the new arrivals on board. She had no way of effectively vetting anyone properly, and several minor incidents had already been reported to her. “And you found…”

  “Point zero one light seconds away,” Xero answered immediately.

  “That is the lag between screen updates on any workstation I am using. That’s 1800 miles,” Deb said, doing the mental calculations. “Just on the outer edge of our sensor range.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “A ship, comms relay, drone, or what?” Riggs asked.

  “Possibly any, but it’s obviously an AI program running a constant attack. That would require a lot of power and room. Also, the speed doesn’t allow for a more remote sending unit. It has to be generated immediately. That rules out the drone or comms relay.”

  “So, the shadow we’ve been seeing the last two days is a ship?”

  “That is my conclusion,” Xero said, expanding a display window of seemingly empty space.

  “Something is out there. It doesn’t want us to maneuver but seems okay with keeping us alive. Is it Gateway? The admiral?” Deb asked.

  “No way to know, Lieutenant. The other issues were almost certainly from them. They downloaded with a standard maintenance update from Fleet Command on Luna. This could be their next step or totally unrelated.”

  Riggs was thinking of how helpless she had felt watching the Alice Springs get attacked and breaking up in orbit. “We have no large weapons capability yet. That ship could have missiles.” The SEs were now being helped by several Marines who had recovered, working around the clock on restoring weapons capability to the warship. They were even using the giant 3D printers to manufacture ships’ munitions. Deb knew she was an inexperienced captain, and the ship would be no match against any genuine threats out here.

  “Thank you, Xero, for everything. I assume you can bypass this?”

  “I can compensate for what they are doing. I can get us moving but can’t guarantee I can lock them out of our system. I also have to wonder what they will do next. They probably didn't expect you to have someone like me on board. Once they see their hack isn’t working, then what?”

  Riggs considered it long after Xero left the room. ‘Then what?’ That really was the question. She called Captain Hauk to the bridge. Perhaps he could offer some insight, some possible solutions she wasn’t seeing.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  We had a couple of days’ travel to Nevis’ presumed location near the coast. “We doing this all on foot?”

  Voss shrugged, “Unless you see something usable. Nothing airborne, though. I feel sure he can spot that.”

  I scanned the countryside and investigated likely looking homes and barns as they passed. No obvious signs of travel. The stalled autocars lining the road in places were all useless, many were simply charred shells.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked. It had been my nagging question since the attacks went down. “You mentioned survivors. Where are they?”

  “Not here, not sticking around any of the red zones,” Voss said as she trotted at a steady rhythm. She wasn’t as fast as me, but she was doing alright. “Originally, we thought around thirty percent of the global population was wiped out on Last Day.”

  “Three billion people,” I said, almost numb to the sheer magnitude of that loss.

  “Yeah, that was a low estimate it turns out.”

  “How low?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  “Depends on the day. The losses seem to be multiplying exponentially. My people now believe it was closer to forty percent in the initial attacks. Since then, the numbers have continued to add up. Not at the same rate but steadily increasing just the same. The last figure I had was fifty-two-point-five percent of the population missing or dead and over sixty by the end of the summer.”

  “Jesus Christ. Half the human population,” I said, stopping to take a drink of water.

  “Worse in some cities. Populations in London, Hong Kong, and New York are almost totally wiped out. Five percent of the populus left…maybe, hard to have anything more accurate.”

  “Where are the bodies?”

  “That is a damn good question,” she said, also taking a pull from the hydration pack on her back.

  “The creatures are probably feeding on some, but they seem most interested in the living. Still, the smell of decomp is everywhere.”

  My suit’s filters blocked most of the smell, but whenever my face was exposed, I knew she was right. The smell of death hung to every thing, every place.

  “Tell me about what you found, you mentioned something when you called.”

  We began walking again and could see a neighborhood in the distance. My map display showed a small town just beyond.

  Voss told me about the attacks she’d endured and then her observations of the girl who walked right through them. Something about the description made me think about the blonde woman back in Texas. She had mentioned a witch several times. Someone whom the creatures seemed to ignore.

  “You think this WitchWalker had some power over them? Something like your Wraith maybe?”

  “Maybe, but don’t think so. The Wraith doesn’t seem to be much help against many of the beasts. Also, the girl didn’t seem to even notice them, like they weren’t even there.”

  She picked up the pace seeing something ahead that obviously grabbed her interest. “If the biologics are all weaponized, Joe, they seem to respond in proportionate mass to the enemy.”

  “So, the more people we have to fight, the more aggressive and more of them that will come after us?”

  “I think so, yes,” Voss confirmed.

  That would explain some of why the encounters with Red-7 were so aggressive and determined.

  “That’s why you wanted me to come alone?”

  She stopped near a building and turned toward me and smiled. “Sure. That was one of the reasons.”

  Damn, this woman was aggravating.

  “Can you drive it?” Voss asked.

  Ada had assured me I could, but the meat part of my brain was much less certain.

  “Yes… maybe,” I said. It was a vintage Indian motorcycle. A 2035 Thunder Chief, one of the first totally electric bikes the company ever made. Voss had spotted a sign on a metal building that somehow clued her into looking inside. The girl flat-out knew her stuff.

  “You sure it will run on P-cells?”

  “Yeah, it has the adapter already installed. Just give it a try,” she urged.

  Since the bike wasn’t powered when the EMPs hit, chances were reasonably good the entire system might not be fried. The key fob was sitting in a coffee cup on a nearby bench. This had to be a restoration project for whomever previously owned this place.

  I straddled it and got a feel of the weight. Part of our RDT training had involved riding motorcycles in case we ever needed to ‘borrow’ some from the locals to get to a clear extract point. Those were all self-balancing with internal gyros for stabilization. I could tell at once this one depended on the rider balancing it. With more than a little trepidation, I pushed the start and was rewarded with total silence. Still, the small dash had lights. I twisted the throttle slightly, and the bike jumped forward several feet.

  “Yeah, Cowboy, it’s on.”

  We rolled the machine outside and loaded up. Sumo found a spot in front of me, and Voss sat on the seat behind me, the closeness of her body making me feel emboldened to attempt this stupid adventure. I didn’t ask about the Wraith, I didn’t much care if we left it behind entirely. Damn thing still gave me the creeps.

  I patted the pup, and we were off. Voss’s grip tightened around my waist, and I found I could raise my knees up high enough to cradle Sumo, keeping him from sliding around too much. Soon, I was speeding down the road relying on Ada to identify debris or creatures on the path ahead. My improved reflexes really came in handy as I dodged tree limbs, cars, and something large and dead. As we moved back farther away from civilization, the ride took on an entirely different feel. The bike was whisper quiet. No artificial engine sounds like most modern bikes were required to have. The tires crunching over the dead leaves and the wind whipping past were the only sounds. Occasionally, Voss would point out something, but I think we both were just enjoying ourselves. The sun was out, the temperature was mild, and two people were out for a nice Sunday ride with their dog.

  Okay, there was a lot wrong with that statement, but the feeling matched…at least for a while. Enjoy the small wins while you can, right?