Chrysalis

39

Asperton dropped her hand and looked around the table. “Another message is coming in.”

“Now?” Kramer asked as everyone exchanged glances.

Asperton nodded. “In real time.”

“Shit!” In unison, Peyton and his cyber-warrior, Snow, rose from their seats and ran to separate workstations. As Logan watched, he saw Peyton routing the incoming message to a screen so they could all read it. Snow was up to something else — and whatever it was, he was typing furiously and it occupied his entire attention.

A screen came to life with the kind of white-on-black message Logan was all too familiar with. There was one difference: it was still scrolling up the screen, like the opening credits of a movie — clearly, still being transmitted. But what remained did not take long to come into view.

For a moment, silence. Then, suddenly, everyone was speaking at once.

“What the hell?” Kramer thundered.

“Full capture!” cried Peyton in a tone close to exultation.

“This wasn’t an authorized communication,” Asperton said almost to herself as she stood up.

Wasn’t authorized, Logan thought. Only a lawyer would think of it that way. But she was right: earlier that same morning, they’d been clearly told that there would be no further communication until after payment had been transacted.

That was not the only unusual thing about this message. It was written in the first person. It had no punctuation, except for the mistaken apostrophe in a possessive pronoun. The tone was different, too: it had less authority. If Logan understood it correctly, it was offering a way to defuse whatever “bomb” had been placed — an offer conspicuously absent from all previous missives. It sounded almost as if the sender was…

He was jolted from these speculations by the sound of an argument nearby. The man named Snow was still at the workstation where he’d taken up position, and now Asperton and Peyton stood on both sides of him, practically yelling at each other.

“There’s a precedent!” Peyton was saying. “A precedent that can’t be broken — under any conditions. We all agreed!”

“This supersedes any agreement!” Asperton was actually yelling. “The conglomerate’s at stake. Lives are at stake!”

“We don’t have a lot of time here, people!” said Snow, as loudly as either of them. His fingers were on the workstation keys. “For some reason, they were a little sloppy this one time. Our sniffer caught a couple of stray packets. If we freeze the feed — the whole damn feed — there’s a chance we can grab this thread, see where it leads. But if we don’t do it now, right now, the cache is going to flush.”

“But that could crash the entire architecture!” Peyton said. “It’s never been tried. You’d be yanking a hatch off a jet in midflight. And besides — he’s here.”

Peyton turned toward Logan. And as he did, Logan realized what they were talking about. It was the only thing they could be talking about: the unknown entity whose mere name — the time he’d heard it, and then later when he’d mentioned it — seemed to carry the force of a tactical nuke.

“You’re talking about the Helix,” Logan said.

Peyton’s face, already red, flushed deeper. And in the momentary silence, Asperton seized her opportunity.

“Freeze it,” she ordered Snow. “Freeze it right the fuck now.”