Predator Code (Tales from Wildhearth #1)

Chapter 17 - Somebody Lied to You

Jett didn't know why she'd told Karno her name. He didn't need it, but something about the wolfkin dealer had settled her just enough to let it out. Maybe it was just the simple nostalgia of talking tech with someone who skirted the law, someone who ran in similar circles as she had once done in her old life.

In the end, it didn't really matter—her plans were already swinging into motion. She would probably never see him again.

Putting Karno out of her mind and suppressing the whirl of emotions in her chest, she padded into the safety of her room at Hiyfa's warrenary once again, closing the door gently behind her and exhaling a calming breath, glad to have clean air again. Gathering herself, she retrieved the custom snooper module from her pack and set about splicing it into the set-up of her rig.

It took the better part of an hour after removing the case and rearranging the guts of the machine to accommodate the multitude of connections that the snooper required, its tendrils reaching into every subsystem of the computer and jacking aggressively straight into the howl-net. The little cloud of subroutines inside it would ride those waves across the city, hunting for anything Jett instructed them to.

Satisfied the wiring was correctly soldered back together, she booted up her machine and went to work. A new root menu skulked unobtrusively at the bottom right hand of her screen now, labelled with what to a casual observer would be a meaningless splurge of numbers. Jett clicked through to it to initialise the snooper's systems. A series of fields sprang up on her screen next, several dozen optional categories from names to addresses to account numbers, purchase values and product traces. All she had to do was punch in the relevant information, and the tenacious little piece of tech would do the rest.

First, she utilised the snooper to brute-force her way into the Conclave's planning directory and started scrolling through the overviews of each city district. Right at the bottom of the list amongst a graveyard of abandoned, derelict names, to her amazement, she actually found a listing for Belforra—the district name she'd extracted from Fisker. She blinked. And opened it up.

Then she spat out a curse.

Nothing. The Conclave's own databases told her nothing about the place. There wasn't even a grid reference. The listing provided a measly three sentences, outlining an unremarkable quarrying sector of the city, mostly home to beaverkin workers and a smattering of other citizens, long since abandoned.

Jett dug her claws into her headfur in frustration. It didn't take a genius to work out that someone had expunged the real records of Belforra from the database, leaving a vestigial name with nothing tied to it. Rolling her tongue around her teeth, she pulled up the relocation orders signed off by both Fisker and Zanzihar and scanned them. Not a single one of them mentioned Belforra, but she hadn't really expected them to. The wolfkin were covering their tracks well.

So she was left with the felkin designate. She didn't have a lot to go on, but knowing his name and his occupation would be enough for the snooper to get started. Her claws clattered across heavy keys, and a handful of seconds later, the snooper whirred industriously. The screen flickered, and for a moment, she wondered if she'd underestimated the power requirements, but then a surge of data burst across the monitor. Jett's eyes widened.

"I'll say this for you, Karno," she murmured. "You don't screw around with your gear."

Going back a full month, the module had wrenched free every purchase Zanzihar had ever made across three different stamp holdings registered under different names. But such rudimentary measures wouldn't fool the high-end snooper module Karno had provided. It could trace back through the hoops of misdirection, linking every line of text on this screen to the dead felkin.