Operation: CODESTRIKE

Chapter 3

Silently, Chris slipped through the halls of Kadic Academy, moving almost without a sound. At first, he paused every couple feet, making sure that he wasn't spotted by his target. But as time wore on, he abandoned more and more of his caution. He could have walked right behind Jeremie, and the boy wouldn't have noticed him. He seemed rather focused on something, so much that he didn't look up from his feet as he moved, walking just slow enough for it not to be called running. Chris had a bad feeling he knew what the boy was thinking of. He kept following him. Quickly, he guessed where he was being led; Jeremie's room in the boarding dorms, the one a couple doors down from Chris and Grey's own. Good. If the boy spotted him, Chris had a cover story. You were allowed to go back to your room at this time of day, after all.

Still running silent, Chris kept pace. He was close enough that he could hear anything that Jeremie said, and there seemed to be plenty to hear; the boy was quietly talking to himself in French. From what Chris could hear, he was saying something along the lines of "got to be right" over and over again.

Confusion filled Chris's mind. What the hell could he need to be so right about?

Though he listened hard, he couldn't make out anything else from the boy's mumblings. Frustrated, but not discouraged enough to give up pursuit, Chris kept moving.

In moments, he saw that his theory had been correct; Jeremie was moving towards his room. Chris slowed here. The hallway was empty, with no cover for him to use. So he changed tactics; he went from hiding in cover to hiding in plain sight. Sticking his hands in his pockets, Chris strode out into the hall, bobbing his head to imaginary music. As he walked, he noticed he and Jeremie weren't the only people in the hall. At the other end, leaning against Jeremie's door, was a girl Chris had seen a couple times, something unsurprising considering the girl's shockingly pink hair and matching colored clothing. Chris frowned as he tried to remember anything about her. She was Canadian, he remembered that. Probably French-Canadian, considering that she was at Kadic. An exchange student, like himself. Had a last name like some rock band...Beetle? Zeppelin? Stones?

Yes, that was it. Stones. He couldn't remember her first name. though. A...something. Alana?

Though that wasn't the biggest question in Chris's mind. That was; what the hell was she doing outside Jeremie's door?

Waiting for him seemed to be the answer. The moment Jeremie noticed the girl, he quickly hurried over to her. Chris slowed, predicting a conversation. Needing new cover, he turned and walked to his own door and pretended to fish around for his key, all the while listening to the two talk.

"There you are." Stones said, leaning away from the door and closer to Jeremie. "What took you so long?"

"Jim," Jeremie replied. "He caught me in the courtyard. Got mad about me missing so many PE classes."

"You really should stop skipping them so much," Stones replied.

Skipping? Interesting... Chris thought. He noticed Stone's voice sounded worried. In the back of his mind, he wondered just how good of friends they were...

"PE's just a waste of time," said Jeremie. "I have more important things I could be doing than running around kicking balls aimlessly."

Stones giggled at the unintentional innuendo, eliciting a confused look from Jeremie and a stifled laugh from Chris. Thankfully, Stones and Jeremie didn't hear him, and continued talking.

"Still, you really should stop working so hard. It's not healthy for you." She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. Chris's approximation of their friendship status jumped several levels.

Jeremie replied with a snort. "I'll stop when I finish with the program." He muttered. "Besides, I was never very good a gym in the first place."

Stones giggled again. "Well, I guess I can't really make you stop, Jeremie." She said, though Chris noticed a smile tugging at her lips. He guessed she probably knew a couple ways to get him to stop...

Shut up... Chris told the back of his mind.

"But still, I think…" Stones continued, then stopped. Out of the corner of his eye Chris saw her look up. Jeremie turned to follow her gaze.

Chris simply smiled an saluted the two.

"Can't find my key." He said. Jeremie and Stones nodded sympathetically, then turned back to their conversation. Chris continued to mime looking for his key, while continuing to listen.

"You were saying?" Jeremie said. Stones glanced over at Chris again.

"Never mind. What did you have to show me?"

"Oh, right." Jeremie quickly opened the door to his room and held it for Stones, bowing as he did so. Stones giggle, then swaggered into the room. Jeremie followed and closed the door behind him.

Once he was sure that the two had gone into Jeremie's room, Chris slipped into his own. He shut the door and quickly turned off anything that could make noise. Though his room was several over from Jeremie's, he could easily hear what was transgressing in his target's room via the ventilation system. During his first week at the academy, Chris (through random boredom-induced experimentation), found that if you removed the grill from the cold-air return vent present in the ceilings of all the dorm rooms and stuck your head into it, you could easily hear what was happening in the rooms directly next to yours and the ones just beyond that on both sides, depending on which way you turned your head.

Quickly, Chris did just that, climbing on top of his desk and removing the grill. Recently, he'd jerry-rigged his vent for just such an occasion as this,fully opening the vent then re-securing the metal cover with museum putty, stolen from his art class. The putty was strong enough to hold the grate over the vent and make it look like it was sealed, but also made it easy to remove the panel.

Turning his head, he continued to eavesdrop on Jeremie.

"...wasn't a glitch," Jeremie was saying. "It was sabotage. I don't know how he managed to get into my computer, but he managed to block the super scan..."

He? Chris wondered. Who the hell's he talking about? Grey?

"But you fixed it, right? And secured it?" replied Stones.

"Yes, he won't be able to block it again. But it's still worrying. He's getting more dangerous by the day. I need to find a way to get that antivirus working, and soon. But I can't find any more time to work on it!"

"You might consider taking a break." Stones suggested, voice soothing. "I just learned in Health class that stress can cause the higher brain functions to be temporarily suppressed..."

"I'll rest...you know what? I think I will take a break." Even distorted by several yards of echoing metal, Chris could still hear resignation in Jeremie's voice.

"Trust me, you'll feel a lot better once you do." Stone giggled before continuing. "Besides, I doubt the supercomputer's going to sprout legs and run away if you leave it alone for a day or two."

"You're right. Thank you, Aelita."

Aelita. The name rang in Chris's mind. The girl's full name was Aelita Stones.

That was also one of the words that he wasn't able to understand in Jeremie's conversation earlier. And the supercomputer he'd mentioned had to be the same one in the factory. The one running Lyoko. The other word he hadn't understood.

Chris's blood ran cold, and he felt his hands shake. He had to force them to still to avoid sending tell-tale vibrations through the vent.

There wasn't any doubt; Jeremie knew about the computer, and Aelita was in on it. And the conversation he'd had with Stern and the group at lunch proved that they knew too. This was bad. He had to contact Grey, tell him to hurry it up-

Chris's internal musing was suddenly and violently broken by a loud rapping at his door. The sound was loud enough by itself, but the vent Chris had his head in made it echo. He recoiled on instinct, lost his footing on the desk, and promptly fell to the floor with a cry of surprise.

"Son of a bitch!" He howled, in English. He quickly rose to his feet and shook off the shock. "I'll be right there!" He called to the person on the other side of the door. Quickly, he replaced the vent cover, dusted himself off, and opened the door.

Speak of the devil... He thought to himself. The person on the other side was none-other than the "gothic Asian chick" of Ulrich's group. Yumi, that was her name.

For a moment, fear gripped Chris's chest. Slowly, he started to reach for his combat knife.

Then he noticed that Yumi wasn't alone. There was another girl with her; someone Chris knew much better. She was hard to miss, blond hair cascading down her shoulders, blue eyes alight. Willow Fox, one of the two girls that made up the other half of Chris and Grey's four-person exchange group.

I was wondering when they were going to meet each other... Chris thought to himself. Willow had a thing for Japanese culture, and considering Yumi's origins...

"Hi Chris!" Willow said, before promptly pulling Chris into a hug that drove the air from his lungs and forced her cleavage into his face.

"Hi...Willow..." He gasped out. "Easy...can't...breath..."

"Oh, sorry!" Willow let go of Chris as fast as she'd grabbed him. During the whole exchange, Yumi stood motionless, though Chris thought he saw the barest hint of a smile tug at her lips.

"Sorry about the glomp." Willow said, none of the stated emotion in her voice. "I'm trying to prove my devotion to Japanese culture to Yumi-chan here."

Yumi simply gave a small wave and stayed silent. Chris didn't blame her.

"Uh huh." Chris grunted, rubbing his mid-riff. He was all to familiar with Willow's...obsession wasn't really the right word for it. "Is there any other reason that you're here, other than to attempt to strangle me? I was kind of in the middle of something."

"Yeah, actually." Willow breezed past Chris and sat down on his bed. "I was talking with Yumi-chan-"

"Please, just Yumi." The Asian girl corrected. "I mean, you got it right and all, but it's really kinda weird. I haven't been called that since I left Kyoto when I was a kid."

"Fine, Yumi and I were talking 'bout manga and stuff," Willow continued, rolling her eyes. "And it turns out she's a fan of Black Butler too!"

"Okay..." Chris's mind whirled, trying to remember what the heck Willow was talking about. He got so into it that he almost missed the next part of what Willow was saying.

"-and I was wondering if you still had those collections that I lent you." She finished.

Chris nodded rapidly, happy to finally understand what Willow wanted. She was referring to a set of comics that she'd let him borrow a couple of weeks ago. He'd almost completely forgotten about them.

"Yeah, of course I still have them. Here." Chris reached up onto the shelf above his bed and retrieved a large stack of paper-back books. Willow's face lit up and she energetically yanked the pile from Chris's hands before Chris finished. Instantly, she was off, talking almost non-stop as she leafed through the books.
Chris glanced over at Yumi, who looked a bit put off. She lifted her eyes from Willow and mouthed "help" to him.

Chris shrugged in response. There really wasn't anything he could do. Yumi slumped her shoulders and went back to looking at Willow.

"...and Sebastian's all like, "no way, man, I'm too awesome for that," and Grell is all "fine, but I'll have to cut you with my chainsaw then", but then-" She paused in mid-rant, eyes darting around. "Crap, why am I telling you this! I have the whole damn season on DVD!" Without a word, she left, sprinting for her room and leaving Chris alone with Yumi. The moment she was out of ear shot, the black-clad girl flopped down onto Chris's bed.

"Arg." She moaned. "I thought she'd never leave."

"Well your still out of luck. She'll be back." Chris replied, frowning. He wasn't to happy about a girl who was probably his enemy, especially a Japanese girl, simply laying down on his bed...

Yumi simply groaned and covered her face with her arm. Silence reigned for a bit.

"Well...this is awkward." Yumi said finally. Chris grunted.

Think, think, think...gotta find something to talk about...something that doesn't involve the computer, can't let anything slip... Chris thought to himself.

Yumi saved him the trouble.

"So...I read Millie's interview with you in the paper," She said.

Chris jumped, broken from his thoughts.

"Oh, yeah? Doesn't surprise me. This place seems kinda dry on good reading material."

"There's really not much else fresh to read around here, it's true." Yumi admitted. She slid farther back on Chris's bed so her back was against the wall. Chris clenched his fist against the table. "I mean, there's the library, but they haven't gotten a new book in years."

"Sure." Chris wasn't really sure where Yumi was going with this, but he decided to let it go. As long as they were focusing on him...

"So, what about the interview?"

Yumi paused, observing him. Chris forced himself not to move.

"Well, what you said about not wanting to come..."

"It's true. Just like I said to Millie." Chris clenched his other hand as well. Yumi paused, apparently at a loss for words.

"Then why are you here?" She asked, finally.

Chris felt a dark smile pull at his lips and chuckled.

"By accident."

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Yumi raise one of her eyebrows. She wanted an explanation.

With a shrug, Chris gave her one. It was easier and safer than an actual conversation.

"When the exchange program first set this whole thing up, they went to a bunch of different schools and offered them the chance to go. Anyone who was interested got to try for it. At my school, they had so many people sign u that they had a drawing to see who got to go on this little 'adventure'. First prize was a trip here, and there were a bunch of runner-up prizes so the people who didn't get to go didn't feel left out, hell if I know why. I wasn't going to enter, but these guys in my science class came to me and said they had a way for everyone to get what prize they wanted. So I entered."

"Seems like a pretty quick change of heart..." Yumi muttered. Chris laughed again.

"One of the runner-up prizes was an Xbox controller. I happen to have an Xbox back home, and I needed another controller. So I entered for that."

"Oh...So how the heck did you end up here?"

"Well, as it turns out, the whole reason that the guys needed me to enter was so that they could fill up the last open slot in the drawing. They'd filled the rest with their friends, and apparently the plan was if any of them got in, they'd give the trip to the guys who organized the whole thing, in exchange for payment in some other way. But there was a hitch in their plan; the teachers found out. When they did, they disqualified everyone involved in the plan."

"In other words, pretty much every other person who entered." Yumi guessed.

"Damn right. That's how I got here; I won by freaking default." Chris sighed and shrugged. "On the bright side, I did get my controller. Of course, my Xbox is currently stuck Stateside, so..."

"Pity."

"Yeah..."

Silence fell again.

"So..." Chris started. "Any particular reason you wanted to know?"

"Not really, just curious." Yumi shrugged again. Chris grunted.

"Well, that and Odd was asking..."

"Della Robia?"

"Yeah. Said something about how "we're too good for some American boy,", or something like that."

"I see." Chris growled. He clenched his hands, and his fingers brushed the handle of his combat knife.

"I'm pretty sure he was just showing off, though. He had another girl on his arm."

"Of course." Another thing Chris had learned during his short time at the academy; Odd Della Robia was a womanizer of the highest caliber. He burned through girls faster than a machine gun used up ammunition.

He was going to tell Yumi just what Odd could do with his pointy French head, but from the hallway came the sound of pounding footsteps. He simply fell silent and waited. In seconds, Willow appeared in the doorway, out of breath and clutching a stack of DVD's.

"Got 'em!" She gasped out. "All of them! This is going to kick ass!"

She hurried inside and pulled Yumi to her feet. The Asian girl didn't resist, but gave a quick look back at Chris.

"Good to meet you!" She called out, before Willow dragged her out of sight. Chris waved once, then clenched his hand into a fist the moment he left. With growl of anger, he ripped his knife from it's sheath and slammed it down on the table. The blade sunk a good inch into the cheap wood and stuck. Chris clenched his hands and let the anger burn itself out, before grabbing his knife and sliding it back home.

He sat down on his bed and placed his head in his hands. Barely a day had gone by since Grey had found out about the computer, and they were already fighting a group over it...

Chris glanced up. On his desk, next to the gouge caused by his knife, was his cell phone.

Grey needed to know everything he had just learned. He might know what to do.

Chris glanced up at the vent he had been listening in minutes earlier with a scowl.

It's on now, Belpois, He thought to himself. And I'm gonna kick your ass just like my grandpa did to your traitor Vichy France ancestors and their German pals back in '44.

With that, he got up, closed his door, and grabbed his phone.

Several kilometers from Kadic, with the distance growing by the minute, Grey sat on the bus, ignoring the chatter of students around him. Had he devoted any thought to that matter, he probably would've smiled slightly at the well-hidden reluctance of the other students to annoy him. In the short time he'd been at the school, they'd already learned to leave him alone. They'd certainly picked up on it faster than the students at his school in the States.

Though they would undoubtedly have been interested in his current task if they hadn't been leaving him alone. Sure, few, if any, of them would've been able to understand what he was doing, but still... with his reputation for privacy and the current contents of the screen of his laptop, anyone would be suspicious.

His laptop pinged, an error in his code. Tapping over to it, he fixed it, then continued writing as the debugging tool he had written himself continued to run on the rest of the code. In the empty seat next to him sat a cell phone and his external hard drive, both connected by multiple wires to his backpack and from there to his laptop. Every once in a while he glanced at both, making sure they were still safe and in a secure position. He'd lost electronics to random bus movement before, and he wasn't about to let it happen again, especially not to these devices. The machine-gun-fire clacking of keys never changed pace, even as he looked over them.

He sat in the front of the bus. Predictably, none of the other students had wanted the seats in the front, instead opting for the ones in the rear of the bus, as far away from the teachers, who sat a few seats behind him talking amongst themselves, ignoring their classes. Two seats ahead of him, Jim sat with his arms crossed, watching the group with a wary eye. He ignored Grey completely, focusing on the more active kids at the back of the bus. Just as he'd intended.

Ten minutes into the bus ride, Grey looked up as someone sat down in the seat across the isle from him. It was the French boy he had filled Chris on, Odd.

"What're you doing up here?".

Grey looked up at him, still typing at the same speed. "Trying to get things done."

Ignoring the barbed tone of his voice (or not noticing it at all), Odd stayed where he was. "Well yeah, that's obvious. But what're you trying to do?"

He leaned across the aisle, trying to see the laptop's screen.

Grey tapped two keys, and the contents of the screen disappeared, replaced with a text editor and nearly thirty pages of blather about some sort of somatic cell, the homework for the advanced biology class he was in with Chris. He continued typing, but had Della Robia been paying more attention, he would've noticed that what Grey was typing had no connection with what was actually appearing on screen. false homework program had been an idea of Chris's, thought up originally as a novel way to cover playing video games in class, but created by Grey. It contained nearly eighty pages of random homework assignments, and would show between twenty and thirty when first launched. As the user typed, it would continue to fill in the assignment from it's memory, regardless of what keys they pressed. A touch of Grey's own was that it would convey key-presses back to whatever program had been running beforehand, so he could continue to code while making others think he was doing something unimportant, like the essay on mitosis that he was supposed to be doing.

"Homework," he said coldly. Odd visibly lost interested the moment he mentioned the dreaded "H-word"

"Okay, fine. Can you at least stop typing when you're talking to me? It's kinda creepy. Seriously, not even Jeremie can type that fast while he's talking, and he's crazy about computers."

"I'm crazier." Grey said coolly. "Now, if you'd stop annoying me, I'd like to get back to this essay. I want to have it done before we arrive."

"Jeez, calm down." Odd muttered something under his breath, a curse word in Spanish that he'd probably picked up from dating a Spaniard at some time or another.

"Don't call me that," said Grey over his shoulder as the boy headed back towards his friends at the rear of the bus. He, too, knew Spanish.

Odd threw him a one-fingered salute, which Grey ignored, already back to his code, having not even paused in his typing.

A useful skill, that, mused Grey to himself. And one that apparently even the vaunted Jeremie lacks. Interesting.

He made a mental note to mention this discovery to Chris whenever the he felt down. Finding out that someone he knew was better than a French person never failed to bring his fellow exchange student's spirits up.

Though, in point of fact, he had never met, nor even heard of, someone who could do what he had been doing: formulate what he wanted to put into the computer in his head, then effectively queue it up in his mind to be typed as fast as his hands could move. In his mind, he was nearly eight hundred lines of code ahead of what he was typing in.

Eight hundred lines of code was eroded by his rapid pace, and before a further ten minutes had passed, he was done with the program. Making sure that the phone and hard drive were connected to the power source in his backpack that Chris had "liberated" from the Kadic computer lab and his laptop, he pressed the run button.

Almost immediately, the phone lit up, and the hard drive began chittering to itself. Thousands of lines of code streamed past on the screen. In the factory, a phone hidden somewhere in the mass of wires surrounding the supercomputer lit up as well. Data was exchanged, lines of code passing through the ether between the two devices.

Grey sat and watched the files download for a few minutes, then pulled up an index of everything that had been copied already, just to pass the time. There were quite a few things that had been skipped over already – things that had been deemed too complex to copy wirelessly by the program without the risk of massive file corruption. He filtered the list by things that had been skipped, just to see what he still had ahead of him, and started to look through them.

Why would a program for a scanner be… eight terabytes?

He swore under his breath in Spanish.

Could be a bug...nah, that's not right. Well, I've got to see more of that one later.

He scrolled down some more, before finding something even more interesting.

Return to the past'? He wondered. What the heck is that? Some kind of backup thing? Nah, doesn't fit. Maybe it's for altering the timeline of the virtual world…

His train of thought was interrupted by a pop-up on the screen – a picture of Chris, with the words 'incoming call' a number superimposed over it. He clicked the green button on the box to answer it, and pulled a wireless headset (cannibalized from an Xbox Live communicator) out of his backpack.

"Yeah?"

"We've got trouble." Chris's voice came from the other end of the line, and Grey could tell he was worried. "It's confirmed, Belpois knows about the factory. He was talking about it with his girlfriend Aelita."

"Oh?" Grey raised his eyebrow. "Aelita Stones, the girl with the hair?"

"Yeah, that's her. And before you ask, yes, I'm damn sure they're a couple. Well, at least Aelita thinks they are. Not sure about Jeremie..."

"Stay focused. How do you know that they know?"

"I tailed Jeremie to his room, like I said I would, and listened through the air vent. Heard of something called a 'super scan', whatever the hell that is. He was talking about it being interfered with by someone."

"Who?"

"No idea, just kept saying 'he'. Thought it might be you."

"It wasn't me." Grey confirmed. "I haven't seen anything like that yet."

"Anything else I should know about?"

"Not really. That Asian chick, Yumi, is being dragged around by Willow. She brought her into our room for a while, made for awkward conversation. Nothing about the factory, don't worry. Just be careful. You know Willow gets around Asians, what with her obsession with anime and all."

"Right, I'll be careful."

"Sure. Anyway, how goes Operation: CODESTRIKE?"

"CODESTRIKE?"

"You know. That thing with the computer. I gave it a code name. Too risky to say it with Jeremie's group near."

Grey glanced down at the screen. The data transfer was still in progress.

"I've got it running now.

"Any idea you'll be done?"

"I think it'll be done by around eleven tonight. There's some weird stuff in here though, the weirdest of which is going to require being on-site to copy. I don't want to risk it getting corrupted."

"Of course. Damn you, Murphy."

"Hear that. So I'll keep this running, and we'll go in tonight."

"Solid copy. I'll see you when you get back." There was a click, and Chris hung up the phone.

Grey slipped his headset back into his bag and went back to work.