Getting Lucky: Ganymede Survivors, #2

Getting Lucky

Alexei Sasha Davidoff has a problem. He’s babysitting Club Bebop and investigating a mysterious incident that might have been the root cause of his death, well, sort-of death, on Ganymede. And someone else is in the Mars police-sealed archive he’s searching, but he/she/it runs whenever he tries to make contact.

Lucinda Lucky Burbank, multibillionaire Luther Burbank’s only heir, is broke and stuck on the moon, working two menial jobs to pay air tax and occasionally eat. It’s not helping that she has to pilfer net access from the offices she cleans at night to search for evidence that her stepmother set up her father’s accident.

When Sasha finally chases down the intruder to the Bebop office, he finds Lucky Burbank, quite possibly the last person in the Solar System he’d expect to be cleaning the nightclub. With her unique help, he gets into the Burbank Industries and MarsCorp networks and also finds evidence that there was a native culture on Mars before the planet died.

However, it’s going to take both of them together—with some help from Ganymede’s ghosts—to dig up the digital evidence, save the physical evidence, and solve the mystery of what caused the friendly fire disaster seven years ago.

CHAPTER ONE

The Woods are empty, dark and...deep

LUCINDA BURBANK WAS SEATED on the floor, leaning against the base of the immersion rig behind a gleaming Earth-wood desk, her mind, quite literally, several light-minutes away. Well, mostly. She was still breathing on her own.

Either her father’s record-keeping had been appallingly bad, or whoever had scooped up and sealed away all his files hadn’t given a mutirat’s ass about being able to find anything later. Her father had been meticulous. One of Luther Burbank’s rules of thumb was to keep comm records tidy so anyone with a subpoena wouldn’t have to go fishing, and never commit anything to a server you wouldn’t want to see on a newsfeed.

Since the scoop-and-seal person had been a Bradbury district attorney, probably with family ties to MarsCorp three generations deep, it didn’t bode well for the investigation into her father’s death. It meant someone at MarsCorp wanted Burbank Industries and Luther Burbank’s estate in a holding pattern for as long as possible.

Three guesses as to who that might be.

If there was anything incriminating in any of the jumbled mess, it probably pointed to Courtney Liu Burbank—the only person with ties to Burbank and MarsCorp who had profited from everything being sealed away for a possible investigation that hadn’t started in over a year.

And if anything incriminating existed, Lucinda was going to find it and get her life back from the conniving witch who had been married to her father, no matter how much time she had to spend cleaning Lunar banking execs’ offices to siphon net access. A human cleaner was pure vanity, anyway, because the non-executive offices were cleaned robotically and were probably in better shape. At least in her opinion.

She froze when she heard the unmistakable alarm ping of someone else entering the archive. She’d set it up as an extremely creaky door opening and it was groaning for all it was worth. She didn’t get the sense of another person, and definitely not stepmonster Courtney’s unique signature.

That meant it couldn’t be anyone with a legal right to be in that file archive; a datacop wouldn’t be sneaky enough to set off her alarm. Who else would even care about the last twelve months of Luther Burbank’s electronic life? It wasn’t like he had rabid fans spread across the Sol system, and he’d been dead for almost fifteen months, so the oldest of the data was at least two years out of current. Truthfully, the oldest was a decade older than that, as her father held onto things for reasons clear only to him, in spite of the possibilities of subpoenas and newsfeeds.

She stilled her mind and waited. Eventually, it came. The unknown other person dipped a toe into the data and grunted.

Definitely not Courtney, because that mental sound was full of testosterone and Y-chromosome, and even in the net it was threatening. Time to go. She started to withdraw and felt him change code-loops; she froze again.

Hello? Baritone, encroaching on bass, so definitely male. Smoothly polished voice analog, almost as if he spent more time in the net than using his physical vocal cords. That meant professional hacker, and she was so unprepared to fight off a pro. She wasn’t even properly immersed, just accessing bleed-off bandwidth while maintaining basal metabolism.

Feke, her job. She couldn’t let him track her back to the bank or she wouldn’t have the job anymore and wouldn’t be able to get another one like it. She would have to evade without engaging her entire mind.

This wasn’t going to be pretty, and it was going to take a long time.

SOMEONE ELSE WAS IN the Luther Burbank data archive. Since nobody at all was supposed to be in it, Someone Else was decidedly annoying.

Sonofadoll. Alexei Mikhalovich Sasha Kirilski Davidoff, the silent death of Strike Team Delta, barely registered that he’d said it out loud, although he was mildly astonished that he had enough physical engagement to be able to speak. There was nobody to hear, other than Sprite, the AI who catered to biological inhabitants of Club Bebop.

Right now the only biological inhabitant was Sasha, firmly ensconced in Glitch’s black rig while Glitch was busy healing, or trying to heal while worrying about the recovery of his shiny new mate. Unless Travertine was wreaking havoc in the Luna Base rehab center, that was.

But in the meantime, someone was tiptoeing through Luther Burbank’s personal data, the archive that MarsCorp police had sealed after his suspiciously bizarre death just over a year ago. Somewhere in this chaotic mess of bits, Strike Force Colonel Ramsin Singh was convinced, resided the original footage of the incident that spawned the Ganymede revolt. The revolt that had ended when the Strike Force had been tricked into shelling its own electronic warfare bunker and killing—temporarily at least—both First Lieutenant Joseph Glitch Bannister and Chief Warrant Alexei Mikhalovi…ah, Sasha.

Sure, he was breaking and entering, but that was his thing and he was doing it for the government anyway, so it wasn’t going to bother his conscience. If he still had one, which he wasn’t entirely sure about.

Hello? He Sent it to the Someone Else, then quieted his mind to listen for any kind of response. When it came, it was a faint squeak high in a female register, so his ghost was either a mouse, a woman with moderate shielding, or a male who didn’t have a good high-frequency block on his thoughts. He also got a data vector off the noise, which meant one thing:Pursue.

He pursued.

Beyond Neptune, to a geosensor at the bottom of the Marianas trench, hopping between belter habitats like some sort of deranged pinball, trying to get into Luna Base and being repulsed—which gained him quite a bit of virtual ground on his quarry—and finally a mad dash to the executive floor of Offworld Swisse, a couple of blocks from Bebop, where the ghost disappeared. She had been running for hours in biological time. In net time, it seemed considerably faster, but that was probably because of the relativistic speeds. On the other hand, she didn’t seem to have any access to the military nets that cheated the light limit. If he hadn’t been trying to keep her in sight, he could have beaten her back to Luna City with ten minutes to spare.

Why would a system banker be mucking around in a Martian sealed data archive? He cracked the OS network like a laser through regolith, which was a little disturbing from a depositor’s point of view, and sucked in the security vid feeds for the entire floor. Nothing but empty office suite after empty office suite, with the occasional cleaning cart; he didn’t even see any of the janitorial crew, so they must be on break. The actual port address was an immersion rig in the CFO’s office, but there wasn’t even a heat signature left on infrared, except for the power unit. It was still running, casting a heat shadow onto the floor next to the life support couch.

He ran a quick IR check in the other offices: All power units had been carefully shut down, probably as a security measure—a powered rig was a vulnerable rig. Sure enough, there was a cleaning cart outside the CFO’s office, with several spray bottles hanging off the forward rail. And there were recent footprints leading away from the cart down the hall, just nothing between the office and the cart.

The sound of his fist hitting the rig’s armrest startled him. He must not have his emotions tuned down as much as he’d thought, if he’d given physical vent to the frustration.

Someone had to have hacked into the bank’s rig from outside the net. Glitch would have been able to figure out how in six seconds or less, but Glitch wasn’t here and figuring out how other people broke in wasn’t part of Sasha’s MOS. Dust, he didn’t even have Singh to ask for backup on this.

Whoever it was, she—or he, but he was more than ninety-five percent sure it was a she—was good at evasion and knew the intertwined Sol System nets almost as well as he did, probably almost as well as Glitch did. There weren’t that many black hats left who could make that claim, and Sasha knew pretty much all of them by signature. There were a few more white hats, but they didn’t tend to break police seals without higher authorization. He was one of those, and truthfully, he couldn’t think of any others who might have a reason to go fishing in Big Daddy Burbank’s old files.

Disgusted, he pulled out of immersion and let things settle for a few minutes, carefully blocking any further emotional reaction to the search and the chase. Anger and frustration messed with pulse, respiration and blood pressure. Without the rig’s mitigating influence, he needed them normal until he was fully re-integrated.

Then he was going to punch a wall. And then he was going to get drunk, because there was a perfectly good bar downlevel. Glitch had the bar, had the Open Mike netcasts, the woman, the dusting life outside of Singh’s orbit.

Sasha had a rusting ghost in a locked room full of jumbled debris, a cold trail, and no backup. And he was going to have to try again tomorrow, because Singh wanted the source of the footage that had ended Sasha’s second life.

LUCINDA LEANED AGAINST THE wall of the bathroom stall and tried to slow her breathing down to a level approaching calm. Or at least pretending to approach calm. He had heard her. Even being as unobtrusive as possible, with only part of her consciousness engaged in the first place, whoever had broken into the archive had gotten a vector on her as she exited, had pursued her through most of the networks of human space and—she was pretty sure—knew where she had exited.

Only military-grade electronic warfare specialists were that good. And they were difficult to come by, particularly since the last battle of the Ganymede disintegration when most of the Strike Force EW company had been killed by friendly fire. Oddly enough, people didn’t think it was safer to be immersed during battle after that. Rumor had it that some of them were still floating around in the net without bodies to come back to, literally military ghosts in the machines.

Her head instinctively snapped around to stare at the corridor entrance to the bathroom, even though it was beyond the stall door. Had she run into one of the ghosts of Ganymede? She shivered involuntarily. It didn’t matter if she had, because she was going to be looking for evidence again tomorrow, or at least the day after. If she wanted her life back, wanted to find the truth about her father’s death, there wasn’t any choice.

Ghost or no ghost, she whispered to the walls.

Besides, Burbank Industries hadn’t been involved in the hostilities, beyond the materiel the heavy subsidiaries turned out for the Strike Force, and that wasn’t even anything ordinance-related as far as she knew. Her father had abhorred guns and refused to allow his companies to have anything to do with them. I’ll make used toilet paper before I’ll build a bullet. It had been one of his mantras.

In the meantime, she had finished the physical work for the night. Sure, she hadn’t actually scrubbed the toilets and urinals, but she didn’t want to be in the building if her pursuer had physical capabilities and the ability to hack