A Break in the Sunlight

29. The Prodigal Sister

On the shuttle to Time Bomb Alpha she nearly fried her cerebral cortex on one of Biddle's booby traps. And if that didn't provide a splitting enough headache, the varigated greenish light that flooded Jaren when she emerged from the shuttle would have done nicely.

"Filter glasses?" said the flight service robot outside the hatch. "Filter glasses?"

Jaren took a pair. Which turned out to help only marginally... though, at least wearing them, objects resolved into single, non-mobile entities.

She steadied herself outside the boarding area, reshouldered the small pack she carried, swallowed against an urge to vomit up her in-flight meal, and set out in search of the Departures display.

Time Bomb was the last system on the course she'd charted for the Night City. Actually small twin planets, on unstable courses, which swung closer and closer to each other with every revolution around their sun, Time Bomb had been a doomed system long before its discovery. But the planets' rich natural resources, had proven too tempting for Co-Protectorate merchants to ignore, and despite predictions that any summer could be *the* summer, thousands flocked here for work, racing the clock to rape the planet of precious metals and rare Green Dwarf biology before the inevitable.

It was the perfect launching pad to the Night City, as far as Jaren was concerned. Periodically, gravity rumblings from the planets' cores caused a panicked exodus among their populations, and refugee ships, *unregulated* refugee ships, shot off to clearing centers in all directions--one of which was the Night City. And such rumblings had been common this summer. In fact, the shuttle bringing her in had been so empty it was nearly cancelled, due to spreading word of rising Amslem readings.

The spaceport was a mess, looking already abandoned. Discarded trash and luggage lay pushed against the walls. Seat cushions were destroyed or ripped completely off most of their frames. Existentialist graffiti marred the walls. And the Departures display, once she found it, was malfunctioning. All the flights seemed to be displayed in a simultaneous and unreadable jumble of LED on the top left corner of the screen.

Well, Jaren sighed, eyeing it sourly through the red glasses. It was probably a moot point. She had already decided she wanted to lay low here for a few days before she made the final leap. She thought she might be close to breaking Biddle's codes, and anyhow, she hadn't yet been able to locate Jeremy in the Night City directories.

She'd spent a lot of effort brushing aside thoughts of Dana Goron, and fears that Jem might not even be there anymore. It wasn't like she could call Ellie and ask what had become of her ex-stepbrother, now was it? The last she'd heard he *had* been there, but even if he still were, it wouldn't be easy to find him. One didn't just look up "illegal information hackers" in the phone book, right? Although, if one had, the Night City book would have been full. That and "thieves", "murderers", "drug addicts" and "entrepreneurs", no doubt.

So she left the spaceport, passed through its pathetic excuse for security with some relief, and set out among the pre-fab, temporary tents and buildings of the city, looking for cheap lodging.

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There wasn't much to do on Time Bomb Alpha. It wasn't that the settlement was particularly boring, but that everything, and everyone, was concentrated on one thing. Harvesting. Mining. Getting the planet fleeced before it smashed itself, and them, up. Everything moved so quickly that Jaren found herself spending most of her time lying on the bed in the flimsy, cardboard-walled room she'd rented, parsing code and staying out of the way. Even the few tricks she'd been able to score had been in, out, buttoned up and paid for before she knew what happened.

But she put the time to good use, and after three days on Time Bomb Alpha, she had finally cleared through the remaining static and located the door through Biddle's code. There had been others of course, decoys, but apart from the one that had nearly fried her, she'd spotted them for what they were. This one, she was certain, this was the one.

She had started with Biddle's stuff, starting small and hoping against hope that something, anything in his files would help her with the larger, deadlier packets in the back of her databanks. The Gennwrugh monoliths, which lurked there like instruments of torture, locked in a nest of static that looked like barbed wire, deadly hornets and snarling Alsations all mixed into one. Still, Biddle's door was something, a small victory. All that was left now was to get by whatever nasty little locks he'd installed. And given the weather reports, it looked like she'd have plenty of time to wrestle with those.

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At 6am on the fifth day Jaren got through Biddle's last door, having lain for seventeen hours, curled up in a ball on the cot in the green-tinted darkness of her room. She pushed sweat soaked hair out of her eyes with an arm that was heavy with lack of blood, leaned over the side of the bed, and vomited violently––repeatedly––onto the floor.

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After that she slept, and when she was awakened in the afternoon, it was by the sound of alarm sirens. Barely conscious, she launched herself from the cot, pulled on her minidress and jacket and over that the tech jumpsuit she'd purchased, grabbed the knapsack she kept packed by the door and slammed out of the door. In the streets, a handful of people ran with her toward the Spaceport. The ground had begun rumbling, and ahead of her seemed to roll. She dodged piles of discarded garbage, and nearly escaped being crushed as a fibre-board wall crashed down just ahead of her. Heart in her mouth, she ran on, passing two signs for Quake Shelters, she turned the corner for the Spaceport.

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It was only three hours later, strapped into the seat of the shuttle to the Night City, that she was finally able to look through the code Biddle had stashed. What she saw there she was having trouble comprehending. She sorted through it, only marginally understanding the import of what she saw. She'd assumed he was giving her some of the utilities he used to break code, his list of contacts, perhaps some codes for key sites. What she found were levels and levels of highly condensed code. Codes for the CIP backdoors, Codes to the CenBank, Codes for Galactic Support Service, the Universal Financial Protectorate, the IAP, Amnesty, the UHP, the list went on and on. How many of them were still valid, she couldn't tell, but Biddle must have skimmed code from every job he'd ever done. Jesus.

Besides the code, there were a small collective of the most deadly encryption and static-cutting utilities she'd ever seen. She turned them over in her mind. Maybe with these, she'd have a chance the Gennwrugh files—but she pushed the thought away. She was still weak from Biddle's static. She wouldn't dare approach the Gennwrugh codes without help.

And so Jaren was faced with a bit of a muddle, between her salted soy nuts and her complimentary beverage. She'd released the locks, and could dump Biddle's information now. There was no question that it could get her arrested, and probably executed. Or she could hang on to it. Use it for herself. Learn from it. Add to it.

She decided to wait. To do nothing for the moment. The Gennwrugh packets were probably enough to get her dead anyhow, so adding these codes wasn't going to change the ante any. In the meantime, she decided, maybe she'd just have a back-door look through the CIP file base, if she could, to see if they had any contact information for a Mr. Jeremy Ren, in the Night City.

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Early the next morning, a sleep deprived and barefoot Jeremy Ren opened the door to his long-lost stepsister. He stared at her in disbelief, barely recognizing the beribboned young girl he knew in the kohl-smeared, black-haired, slutted up young hooker before him. Then she smiled at him, and he smiled back. And she fell into his arms.

And Jaren, for the first time in more than four years, felt like she was home.

All rights reserved. Copyright Jae Darcy 2016