Somnus V - Chapter 29

Numbers seemed to swim together as Kat tried to make sense of the spreadsheet floating in the air in front of her. An analyst’s voice droned on, going over the unrest and increased prices caused by the decline in hybrid tech sales.

Kat didn’t need to be a genius to know that the figures weren’t great. Still, her division had been turning absurd profits for months. Even with the recent bouts of sabotage, they had so much money in reserve that Kat could simply shut her factories down for two to three years without having to make any real budget cuts before they managed to liberate a good portion of VodCom’s operating revenue.

Of course, the rest of the shareholders would try to make trouble for her if she tried that. Every one of them took a small cut from her earnings just as she took a small cut from theirs. It wasn’t even about the total amounts of money. Each and every one of them had more credits than they could spend in a dozen lifetimes, but that wasn’t the point. They wanted more money, and anything that slowed down the flow of credits was an issue.

“We’re adjusting third quarter earnings downward,” her analyst, a thin man in his sixties continued, shifting the image floating in the air. “Still, the damage isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. The newer automated farming equipment is greatly increasing yields while decreasing labor costs. It’s not nearly enough to make up for lost research and production, but the gains are almost enough to cover our losses on their own.”

“Good,” Kat replied, blinking to try and refocus her eyes on the figures. Next to her, Whip had already zoned out, lost in the flickering lights and sounds of her smart glass. “How long do we have until the refineries are up and running? I know our scientists are going to be throwing fits until the very day we can get them a full allotment of isotopes.”

“Three months ma’am,” the man replied easily. “They won’t likely hit full production for another month or two after that. Right now the workers are only training on simulated machinery. It’s one thing to monitor a centrifuge on a computer, it’s quite another when it is filling up the better part of a room, thrumming and squealing next to you.”

Kat nodded slowly, her mind whirring through possibilities. She was going a little crazy. There was no question about that. She hadn’t been able to leave her compound outside of Schaum Tower since the raid on the train.

They just didn’t know where Ice Cobra was or how she was tracking them. One attempt might be luck, but three in a row was more than that. Kat was pretty sure that she could take the other woman now that she knew about her poison, but that didn’t mean that the samurai didn’t have another trick hiding just under the surface.

“Is there anything else?” Kat asked, turning her attention fully back to the analyst. Staring at the accounting numbers all day wouldn’t change anything. They were bad, and getting angry at them wouldn’t make them any less bad. Still, as the man had said, it could be a lot worse.

“No ma’am,” the analyst said with a shake of his head. “Unless you have some specific numbers for you to run, that should be everything for this month’s financial report.”

“Then you’re excused,” Kat replied. The man stood up, his expression cordial, but the second he left the room, it was like someone had flipped off an electrical current. Tension seemed to evaporate around them

“Whew,” She said, leaning back in her chair. “I have to say. The worst part about being an important business lady is all the business. I think I preferred the entertainment vid version of shareholders where they just sat around in small palaces throwing parties every day.”

Whippoorwill shifted slightly, a ghost of a smile appearing on her face despite her still distant gaze.

“To be fair Kat,” Whip said, “I think that’s actually what most of the other shareholders do. They inherit enough structure and employees that their own work and competence is basically meaningless. Other than blustering at shareholder meetings that are usually nothing more than parties for the mega rich, they spend most of their time neck deep in excess and hedonism.”

“We should talk to Heather about that,” Kat replied, standing up to stretch her back. “After listening to nothing but dry numbers for about four hours straight, I could do with a little hedonism.”

Whip didn’t roll her eyes, but then again she didn’t need to.

“You’d just get bored, Kat,” she said dryly. “I know priests that spent more time drinking and doing drugs than you. I’m pretty sure that if someone gave you a sack of cocaine and a knife, you’d just spend the next five minutes talking about the quality of the knife.”

Kat snorted despite herself. Whippoorwill was right. Family, friends, and training. That was basically all that existed for her. She might be going a little crazy from being cooped up in the compound, but that just meant that she needed to exercise more. With enough cardio, she could tire herself out enough to let her worries slip away.

That didn’t mean that they were totally gone though. Kat frowned slightly, her mind going over the last couple of months. She couldn’t help but feel like it was all connected. The assassination attempts, the economic warfare that was sapping away at her reserves, the overly accurate intelligence, even the pressure she was beginning to feel in the tower from her constant advances as she tried to keep up with Mr. Jackson. It all felt connected.

“Whip,” she said, brow still furrowed. “Remember that project you started on after the stock purchases? Something to do with ‘diversifying our communication lines.”

“That and upgrading our cyber security,” Whippoorwill replied, her pupils flicking back and forth as she input something through her smart glass. “I’m working on it right now actually. I’ve got a whole team from the research labs helping out. They don’t have a whole lot to do now that the experiment schedule has slowed down. Honestly, I’m learning a lot. They don’t have the perspective that climbing the tower and working with aliens every night can grant you, but they know what they were doing. I thought I was a hot shot when I started the project, but most of them started coding system architecture around the time my mom was born. They’ve picked up a couple tricks along the way.”

“How is that going?” Kat asked. “Talking with the analysts about our finances always reminds me that we have a bullseye on our backs. Someone out there is watching us and they have enough money to pay for that Ice Cobra person to stalk and try to kill us. There’s no way a samurai of her caliber is cheap. I don’t know how our systems are compromised, but they are. There’s no other way to look at the data we have.”

“I agree,” Whip responded. “The worst part is that until recently we didn’t know for sure how they’ve been monitoring us. I guess we still don’t know for sure, but the communications audit and restructuring gave us a pretty good idea as to what was happening.”

“Finally.” Kat perked up. “Some good news. Come on Whip, give me something good. I’ve felt like a shank of meat left out in a dog kennel for weeks now. I need something positive or I’m going to go crazy.”

Whippoorwill blinked, eyes focusing on Kat as she sat up straight in her chair, her digital business finished.

“I don’t really know that ‘good news’ is how I’d frame it, Kat,” Whip said, pursing her lips. “On one hand, I think I found out how to fix the problem. On the other, the problem is huge. Like, we’re going to have to rework how we do absolutely everything and even then we might still be in trouble huge.“

“Are you sure you can’t just make it a small problem?” Kat begged, batting her eyelashes at Whippoorwill. “A nice simple problem that I can solve with a knife between someone’s ribs in the night. Pretty please?”

Whippoorwill laughed, picking a stylus up from the table and throwing it at Kat. Kat easily snagged it out of the air, pressing it to her side before spinning in an exaggerated circle and falling to the ground.

“I’m wounded!” She warbled piteously, rolling back and forth while Whippoorwill rolled her eyes from her chair. “You’ve grievously injured me in a way that only a neck massage can fix! For shame!”

“Get up Kat,” Whip replied, still chuckling as she shook her head. “I’ll give you a massage later. For now, I wanted to make sure that you knew what we were up against. You were right to be concerned about Ice Cobra. I started worrying when the stock transfers were delayed. Nothing is supposed to do that. The stock market is impregnable and even though VodCom controls the communication network, every megacorp analyzes their satellites and receivers at least once a quarter. Interfering with an actual transmission is supposed to be impossible. It’s the reason that the rest of the companies are willing to use their network.”

Kat rolled over and popped to her feet, a grin warring with darker expressions as she processed Whippoorwill’s comments.

“Are you saying that VodCom is actively participating in our surveillance?” She asked. “Out in the open and without even the thinnest layer of plausible deniability from a catspaw samurai team?”

“There might be samurai involved at some level,” Whip replied, pursing her lips, “but if there are, they’ve been given full access to the VodCom communication network which seems imprudent beyond belief. Every time that Cobra lady jumped us, our itinerary was sent to someone, sometimes a transportation company, sometimes our internal security, sometimes it was an ally, but SOMEONE always got a heads up via their secure networks.”

“But everyone uses the VodCom networks,” Kat said, “that’s why they’re there. VodCom has had corporate rivals for decades, but there has never been an issue with them tampering with communications. It’s going to take a lot for us to raise the issue now, out of nowhere.”

“Every communication I sent to the market was intercepted and delivered late,” Whippoorwill responded, her tone growing serious. “I sent someone to the Chiwaukee regional exchange, the one I was using for the purchases, to look at the records in person. Their sent timestamp and received timestamp were almost a second apart. There’s no explanation for that other than interference, and the only point where that interference could happen is the network itself.”

“Who?” Kat began, forehead pulling up into a frown. “I didn’t hear about you sending someone out.”

Whippoorwill stood up, leaning slightly to the side to stretch her back as she extended her right arm above her head. Kat wracked her memory trying to find any signs that VodCom might’ve been compromised. Whip was right that they used VodCom to plan every event that Ice Cobra had interrupted. It was like the woman had some sort of sixth sense, showing up where she could do the most harm. Every planning conversation involved a small group selected on a need to know basis and the communications only went through the most secure channels.

Either her organization was leaking at the highest level, or Whippoorwill had a point.

“I sent one of Nina’s runners,” Whip replied. “It took a bit to set everything up, but he didn’t even know that it was us running the show. As far as he knew, he was pulling a data drop for a completely unknown party in order to plan a stock manipulation scam. Other than Nina herself, no one even knew enough to sell us out.”

“So someone found a way to delay our purchase requests,” Kat said, frantically searching her mind for another explanation. She felt herself trailing off into silence as her brain worked overtime, but she couldn’t think of another explanation. If the exchange was receiving information on a delay, it meant that something was delaying the information sent out. That combined with VodCom’s actions against her painted a compelling if unwelcome picture.

“They’re breaking the rules,” Kat said finally. “The same rules that keep the corporations from dropping nukes on each other or releasing custom viruses in civilian centers. All of us want customers, and not engaging in a certain level of dirty tricks is considered almost unprofessional, but tampering with communications like this is a line that VodCom just can’t cross. If this gets out, no one will trust them anymore. Every company will develop its own communication network and they will lose eighty percent of their market share in weeks. It could even lead to-”

“Bankruptcy,” Whippoorwill finished for her, voice grim. “If they’re willing to go this far, I’d bet that VodCom is willing to burn the world down around them rather than file for reorganization or God forbid, liquidation.”

Kat shuddered. Whippoorwill wasn’t wrong. Every company kept enough doomsday weapons on hand to end everything if push came to shove. Conflicts and corporate wars could grow brutal and deadly, but everyone knew not to cross a certain line. If any corporation’s profit margins dipped too low, mutual destruction was more or less assured.

“More than that,” Whip continued, “I think your guess about the Stallesp was right. I wanted to try something so I created a dummy network and hooked it up to all of our external ports. It has the same external security as our normal network and it’s more or less a copy of the real one except with some important details changed and with enhanced software scanning for intrusions.”

“Kat.” She paused for a second, pursing her lips as she tried to search for the right words. “Someone broke through our security like it was tissue paper. They sliced through every firewall and piece of counter intrusion software I could throw in their way. Our best encryption lasted nanoseconds, and worse than that there was no outward sign of what was happening. If we hadn’t been monitoring the entire fake network in real time, we never would have noticed. There were a half dozen programs operating in the background to cover their tracks. As best I could tell, we copied them over when we cloned the network.”

“How did they get in?” Kat asked. “Were you able to track them while they plundered our servers?”

“That’s why I’m convinced it's VodCom,” Whippoorwill replied, her voice tight. “Whoever it was, they clearly would have been able to escape if the dummy network were hooked up to anything. We were able to figure out how they accessed our system, but that didn’t help all that much. The signal just… appeared at a telecom node in Britannia. Ordinarily a connection will bounce from one node to another, but there was no origination at all. It was like someone had a computer hooked directly into the communication network, bypassing all procedures and safeguards.”

“No one is that good Kat,” Whip said unhappily. “This isn’t just ego on my part. No one can hack in that smoothly and quickly. The defenses we’re using here implement elements of stallesp magical computing theorem. You literally can’t make some of the parts our servers are using without a couple levels in the tower. The most powerful rigs in the world with the best operators working them would take minutes if not hours to break in, and they’d leave a mess behind them.”

“They had stallesp help.” Whippoorwill shook her head. “There’s no doubt about it. No human is that good. Full stop.”

Kat tapped her finger on the table. An hour ago she would’ve argued with Whippoorwill’s conclusion, but now? Dread filled her stomach as the full meaning of Whip’s words sunk in.

“So not only are the stallesp one step ahead of us, but they have programs buried in our system, and we don’t have any idea how they’ve been there.” Kat replied. “That means they know everything.”

“Not everything,” Whippoorwill said, a ghost of a smile flickering across her face. “I’ve been worried about our security for a while now. I’ve been talking with Emma and both of us were concerned that there was a spy or something like that leaking information. Because of that, we’ve created a top secret network that’s only accessible from the shareholder wing of the laboratories for the truly important things like the status of the 3445 and Nina’s mercenary group and the hybrid stallesp tech designs developed by the researchers. Call us paranoid, but we made sure that all the data in the publicly available network was slightly off. Just in case.”

“It’s the same story with the alternative communication network I mentioned to you,” Whip continued. “We didn’t know where or how we were leaking information, so it seemed like a good idea to shore up all possible weaknesses. Nothing on the private server can be accessed outside of our office suite. If we want to share data, we use hard drives and runners, just like back when we were samurai. Sometimes, the old ways are best.”

“Still,” her happy expression vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. “We only managed to protect a handful of your most important secrets Kat. It's safe to assume that the stallesp know everything else. Whatever the game they’re playing with the isotopes and resources you need for the lab, you should only expect it to get worse. They got us good, and they’ve had us for a while.”

Whip’s voice quieted and her eyes shifted toward the floor.

“I’m sorry Kat,” she whispered. “I was the one in charge of making sure no one broke into our electronics. I should have stopped this.”

Kat walks over to Whip. She put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. Warmth filtered up through her shirt and seemed to seep into Kat’s hand. The scent of shampoo mixed with the awful hair dye that Whippoorwill insisted on using. Kat couldn’t stop herself from smiling.

“Nothing like that,” Kat replied, squeezing Whip’s shoulder gently. “They cheated. You did as much as any human could. VodCom has information that they shouldn’t, but what of it? We’ve managed to eviscerate their finances and we have a stranglehold on stallesp technology. Even if they can make the same products as us, they won’t do that while Dorrik is around to ensure their non-involvement. This is a setback, but we’re in a strong position and we’ll turn this around. Just you wait.”

Whipporwill smiled back at her, and for a second, Kat could feel her heart melting. Then the moment was broken by a shout from outside the conference room.

The door slammed open and Emma ran in, hair disheveled and anger flashing in her eyes.

“The bandits over at VodCom have demanded binding arbitration!,” she growled, clenching her hands into fists. “They’re claiming it was US that interfered with the stock purchases. They’re saying that you were the one that broke into their computers and forced them to buy the isotope futures at an absurd price. They’re demanding every credit back threefold. Even with as much money as you have Kat, that would bankrupt you.”
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