SURVIVAL SKILLS
Disclaimer: I do not own Ace Lightning and associated trademarks, and write this work of fanfiction for no profit.
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Brave new world, Heather thought.
She could remember studying the novel, back in the old days when they still had schools for everyone. She'd topped the course. She always was good at winning.
It wasn't like the novel. Obviously. There probably was some sort of science-fiction scenario existing—assuming it still existed; books were fragile things—plotted out years ago by some hack novelist writing about aliens taking over the world, and who knew, maybe that had even been what had inspired her boss.
The minions guarding the complex looked her up and down, growling slightly as she flashed her identification at them; it was paranoid, but there was still the occasional Resistance attempt. She'd heard the stories about the rebels. That she'd used to know one or two of them was something she tried to think about as little as possible.
She strode up the alien stairway—made of some hardened jelly-like substance, green tendrils forming the rails, an organic creation rather than the synthesized plastic or metal she remembered from the old days.
Ahead of her was a door; the images on it were like something out of a nightmare of hers, not that she'd ever admit to that, demonic faces twisted in anguish. She was used to it, though, and knocked five times sharply in the pattern she'd been taught.
The standard cackle rung out around her as the door opened of its own will; she still hadn't worked out whether it was built into the door itself or some minor minion having a bit of a laugh. The interior of the room was more like Old Earth had been, machinery and wires everywhere like fetuses bound with a thousand umbilical cords. It was mostly staffed by humans, too; the technological experts of the other world had been the so-called good guys.
She was the first one here today, if you didn't count the Master Programmer; rumor was he slept here, if he even needed sleep these days. She really didn't want to find out if that was true or not, though punctuality was one way she could get ahead.
He turned around slowly, swiveling in his chair to look her up and down as she stood straight for the regular inspection. It was annoying, this part—and in the old world she'd have been the first to object to the dress code of miniskirt, high heels and partially unbuttoned blouse—but she was used to it, and knew damn well that he didn't have the guts to take it any further.
"Heather," he drawled, doing his best imitation of a leer. "I see you've finally got your act together."
I left just before dawn and I'm always one of the first three here, she thought bitterly. The time now would have been around seven-thirty in human time, but there weren't many working clocks around anymore. I'm the best you have. Bastard.
He'd already turned back to his monitor screen, rustling around behind it for some papers.
"We got a tracking signal this morning on a hacker over in Capital," he said, sorting through his debris.
Heather had invented her own filing system, which he refused to implement on the basis that it distracted from the important parts of his job. But important or not, it wouldn't take this long to find something if he'd listened to her, she thought spitefully.
"Here's the log," he finally said, thrusting a folder at her. "I want anything you can dig up on their origin, identity and current location, got it?"
"Got it," she echoed, walking over to seat herself at her machine. He was probably ogling her ass, but she couldn't be bothered to worry about it. She had a job to do.
And she was good at it, she knew, tracing the signal from one misplaced digit, trawling through a disorganized directory to find that name which would turn out to be an alias for some rebel. She'd had to learn this the hard way, stealing technological manuals from the bookstore in town after it had been destroyed, poring over them and every other useful-looking book she could get her hands on. She couldn't have handled magic and she wouldn't be able to match the strength of a minion no matter how many martial arts classes she took; technology it was, then, if she wanted anything approaching skilled work rather than the grunt labor most surviving humans got. If they were lucky.
Heather didn't often think about what had happened to those less resourceful than her; the word would have been genocide, on a scale larger than anything the world had ever seen before. It wasn't calculated, like Hitler trying to get rid of the Jews or Stalin…Stalin doing whatever he'd been trying to do, she wasn't sure she remembered that bit of history too well and she didn't need to know it anyway, but in a world where the strong could do whatever they wanted to everyone else, there wasn't a huge chance of survival.
She found the imprint of a hidden file, coded into something nearly unrecognizable; it could have been paydirt, or a virus or a false lead or simply the gibberish it appeared to be. She isolated it carefully, deactivating it so it wouldn't destroy her computer; she couldn't afford mistakes.
The decoding program ran in the background, searching for combinations and algorithms that would make sense; Heather continued her tracking search, looking for details of whoever had tried to get into the Capital system.
They'd put a simple bug in there, looking for any information leaks; the Carnival-folk tended not to be very good with tech, though they'd made some use of the human infrastructure. Mostly for gaming purposes, Heather had heard. Apparently Mega-Mutilation Three had been a big hit with them.
Something that could have been a signature, on an innocent-looking message bounced back from a non-existent address; one single "C" that didn't seem to have any purpose.
She'd known someone with a name starting with that letter. Known lots of people, obviously; but the guy in question had possessed the sort of computer talent that would've got her directly into the sort of jobs she needed.
He'd been friends with Hollander, too, and very much on her list of People She Did Not Want To See Again. It'd get her in trouble, and them in worse. And with what she was doing now, if they ever actually managed to win she'd probably be condemned as a war criminal.
She found a padded file, obviously there just to distract; she deleted it, sending it into the wilds of cyberspace. No other leads immediately presented themselves; but she was thorough anyway, putting two other files through the decoding script just in case. Making mistakes wasn't in the job description.
She barely noticed the others coming in, Derek who she thought had a bit of a thing for her, Polly who wasn't much more than eye candy, Beatrice her closest competitor, Chronic, a gray-skinned minion with some intelligence and a tendency to creep, Mike and Desiree and Pete, old-world techno-geeks with enough skills to survive the apocalypse. They were less her friends than her rivals, in a dog-eat-dog world. Or minion-eat-human.
The decoder icon popped up on her screen; she'd found something.
Capital, a word jumped out at her from the still-jumbled mass of numbers and letters; it looked like the message had been fragmented before falling into her hands. Lady…codes. I'll get Jes…and baby, if alive…return. C.
Heather studied it carefully, hoping for some other meaning to leap out of it; her heart was racing. This was exactly what Rick would want.
The work of a rebel, obviously; the fact it was so heavily coded if nothing else would suggest that. The reference to the Lady, too; evidently Capital would have to be wary of shapeshifters. And whoever had written this message called themselves "C" and knew a Jes-something.
It couldn't be, of course. Not the people she'd known way back in high school. Coincidence. Had to be.
And "baby, if alive", too. Was there any other interpretation of that phrase than the obvious? She'd heard about the refugee groups being trapped in Capital after the latest rebel attack.
Didn't someone pay attention in sex ed class, Mugel? she couldn't help thinking.
It was hard to get access to contraception, these days; Sam would have faced the same bar a so-called lucky and painful miscarriage, Heather refused to remind herself.
She examined the number combinations, looking for something resembling a date, any date; Rick would want to know when this rescue was supposed to take place. Nothing there, but from the file dateit had to be soon. They would be interrogating the Capital humans even as she typed.
There were at least three combinations that could have been coordinates; Heather fed them through one of the new location dictionary systems. Central Antartica—not an option; though it had snow beasts feeding on the penguins now, there weren't any humans there. Middle of the Pacific—apparently some humans still lived on rogue ships; possibility. Somewhere near what had once been Washington DC—plausible, especially for a rescue attempt in Capital.
The decoder bleeped again; nothing else there. She gave the remaining files a quick glance through before consigning them to the trash can.
It would have been easy to delete everything else as well with that single click, but it would have meant her job, and Heather knew what she had to do.
She printed the files off—arranged especially for the purpose on one double-sided sheet; unlike Rick, she didn't like wasting paper—and walked over to collect them from the machine spewing them out in lurid purple.
"Calls himself—or herself—C," Heather said, depositing the sheet on Rick's desk. "Has someone he wants to get out of Capital, likely with a kid involved. From the sounds of it the Lady's been around too. Probable current location coordinates twenty-four sixty-five one-thirty-two, old DC."
He glanced over her printout, and nodded. "Sounds right to me. Good work." He reached a hand to her shoulder in a congratulatory pat that would have turned into something more intimate if she hadn't moved.
It was almost like a game they played, she thought sometimes. He would have won long ago, if he'd had the balls; but for now she cherished what freedom she had.
She waited, just out of his reach, for the next task.
As she listened to Rick's orders to do today's security check, Heather wasn't going to think about whose death warrant she might have just signed, or the child that might or might not have existed.
As the pterodactyl-dragon-thing broke the lab window for the sixth time this month before taking her printout and the other messages for the pack to deliver them to their masters, Heather didn't think about those heavy razor-sharp claws, or what they'd be rending later on in the day.
And as she went home to her parents and to Sam, who needed her, Heather recited in her head the list of all the known locations where computers were still going with real people to run them, and didn't think about her job at all.
Because she was Heather Hoffs, and she was good at surviving.
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The challenge, by Scarab Dynasty: Heather/Rick, baby involved, not necessarily theirs.
Feedback, especially concrit, appreciated.