Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(68)
“Okay,” Remy said, her short dark hair bouncing as she nodded. “I’ll do it, but you have to get me out of here tonight. If they’ll kill whole Rezzes worth of people, they’ll murder me in a second for letting you use my credentials to log in.”
Beck thought about it for a grand total of five seconds. “Okay. It’ll be dangerous, though.”
“More dangerous than the alternative?” Remy asked, a bit of sauciness creeping into her voice.
Beck laughed. “Okay, fair point. I can get you out, but it’ll be noisy. I don’t think anyone will go looking for you right away, so head to the Loop station near the chapterhouse and wait for me there. Now, let’s get to work.”
Beck had to put in very little actual effort once Remy logged in to the terminal mounted on the cage housing racks of servers. All her preparation paid off. The programs she’d tinkered with and improved over the years were less useful than those she’d snagged from the Deathwatch Science division and copies of malicious software confiscated by them over the years. To say they made easy work of the security measures would be an overstatement and simplification, but they got the job done. Slowly so as to avoid raising alarms, but effectively nonetheless.
In half an hour, the operating system was broken enough to let Beck in. The data was encrypted, naturally, requiring a key she didn’t have to be readable as anything other than gibberish. That was the real security measure—that damned reliance on hiding in plain sight. No one would think twice at the people here encrypting their data, making suspiciously powerful software protecting it unnecessary. Which was good, because as it was Beck had only just managed to open the system up enough to copy the information.
When she was done, no klaxons blared. No security guards raised alarms over the public address system. Beck felt an embarrassing sense of disappointment. It was the disappointment itself she found embarrassing—the part of her that was still a kid imagined sneaking through this place, clinging to the shadows and fighting her way out after performing a series of risky maneuvers to steal the information she needed.
Like the Deathwatch itself, the reality was far less exciting. Though by the way her heart pounded as she led Remy away from the lab, she had a hard time telling the difference between fantasy and truth.
32
That the raids went off without a hitch came as no surprise to Eshton. His teams moved well in advance of Beck, so just as she was preparing to load herself into the train car, he and his team moved in on their target.
There were not enough members of the Movement to cover every person in every enemy cell. Two weeks of crunching away at data and matching workers who saw patients that developed Fade B gave them a list nearly a hundred names long. Since they couldn’t afford to only cut halfway through the trunk of the tree that was the conspiracy within the civilian Science division, Eshton had argued for—and won—the right to call in other members of Enforcement.
He didn’t even have to lie. Orders from a Warden, in this case Stein, were enough to convince Wardens of other Rezzes to lend their aid. The charges were conspiracy to break primary Tenets, specifically the one against killing fellow humans except in self-defense or to protect the species. If any Wardens, Guards, or Sentinels took offense at the details of the charges being classified, well, they were at least used to the Watch being opaque in that way.
Moving against a hundred people in the dead of night posed little challenge. Eshton was among the last to take his targets, a couple who lived in a family-sized abode in a pleasant quarter of Rez Conway, only a thousand feet or so from the facility Beck was infiltrating. As the field coordinator for the entire strike, he had to keep himself available for updates until most of the other teams were done.
And oh, how satisfying it was to stand in the shadows on the street near his target and watch the arrest confirmations roll in. First in a trickle, then a flood.
“Me first, and stay calm,” Eshton said to the pair of Sentinels flanking him. “Evans, you know your job.” Evans nodded.
They moved to the front door, which opened with a command from Eshton’s armor. The interior was dark, though of course this wasn’t a problem for him. His HUD switched to night vision and lit the scene in eerie green.
There were three bedrooms, and Eshton breathed a sigh of relief that the right one was obvious at once. The other two were festooned with decorations made by children while the third remained blank. This was the one he moved toward.
The door opened at his touch, revealing his targets. They were sleeping, the wife snoring softly with her husband sprawled across the bed, his arm and leg draped across her. The sheets were twisted. They looked peaceful. A picture of idyllic, everyday love.
Eshton raised a gauntlet to his other partner, Sentinel Tano. She nodded and took the wife’s side as Eshton moved next to the husband. He placed a gentle hand on the sleeping man and triggered the external pacification system. Tano moved in sync with him and did the same.
Twin choking breaths filled the room with a terrible harmony. The shock left the terrified couple speechless and writhing. Without mercy, Eshton dragged the man out of bed and flipped him on his stomach. Wrists were bound at the small of the back with ruthless efficiency.
“John and Frankie Jessen,” he said, the volume of his speaker kept low so as not to wake the children. “You are under arrest for crimes against the Protectorate. You will be immobilized and confined at the chapterhouse pending a thorough investigation of your crimes. Should you be found guilty, the sentence is death.”