Predator Code (Tales from Wildhearth #1)

Chapter 28 - Where Dirty Secrets Go to Die

The nerve centre of the enforcer compound was a very strange place when divested of life. Some consoles had been closed down, others abandoned in haste after the triggering of the alarm. Jett stepped lightly over the threshold, a small part of her convinced they were an instant away from being ambushed by a hidden core of wolfkin and bundled away into the night forever.

But it didn't happen. Instead, they were greeted with a big octagonal room riddled with consoles and sectioned off into a dozen different rooms. Twinned staircases at the far end marched up into a bunker-like office well above the main floor, with a long band of glass that looked down over an area that ought to be teeming with life.

The dark, oceanic blue of the emergency lighting cast a pall over the enforcer nerve centre, but Jett tried to ignore the unsettling sensation of seeing the deserted place, instead focusing on the prize.

"Up there," she said, indicating the office with a nod. "Must be where Hera keeps watch when she's not running around trying to kill me."

"Let's go then."

Keeping low in case of any stragglers, the two stole their way past the consoles, slipping up the staircase to the office. She constantly kept her head on a swivel, unable to shake the sensation that someone was watching them. With the blaring alarm, there was no way she'd hear someone sneaking up behind them.

They sidled up to the door of the office—a daunting thick slab of metal that was more than likely hardened against explosive blasts. Luckily, they'd brought more subtle means to defeat the security measures. A thick lock kept the door clamped shut, complete with a keypad, but Karno had prepared for just such an eventuality. Jamming a screwdriver beneath the lock housing, he snapped the casing open with a grunt of effort and set about cutting a series of wires with speed that left Jett envious. Hijacking the system, he fed the wires into a flat rectangular code-buster board, letting the machine's simple, ruthlessly efficient brain churn through the combinations faster than any normal mind could attempt, bypassing normal lockout countermeasures.

A few minutes later, a clunk sounded as the lock disengaged, and they gained access to Hera's inner sanctum.

Jett stepped through the doorway, her eyes flickering to take in every detail of the room. As it happened, there wasn't a huge amount to take in. Furnished with spare functionality, the biggest thing in the room was a desk, a big steel monster littered with bark-paper reports, computer drives and, rather disconcertingly, an open case containing four wicked-looking knives. She swallowed hard and looked past them.

Behind the desk, built into the wall like a statue carved into a mountain, loomed a massive obsidian computer rig. The screen alone stretched almost two meters wide, larger than anything Jett had ever seen. For a moment, she just stood there staring at it in all its majesty until Karno touched her elbow, breaking the machine's spell.

"Think you can bust that monster?"

"You have to ask?" She shot him a wry smile and stepped forward, slipping into the firm, high-backed seat in front of the machine. The thing had all the comfort of a granite slab, designed for nothing but functionality and certainly not moulded to her slight physique. She reached across the keyboard and tapped the start-up; even the keys themselves required more pressure than she was used to applying.

The gigantic screen bloomed into life, displaying a login screen, featureless save for the text block and a logo depicting a side-on wolf's head in the top corner.

"Give me the shunt." Jett held out a paw. Karno reached into his bag and retrieved the bypass shunt—a rectangular block of hardware that she swiftly wired up to the machine through one of the dozens of jack ports that riddled the outer casing. The shunt was like smashing in a safe door with a battering ram because you didn't know the combinations. It would trigger every kind of firewall and security alert imaginable, sending alerts all over the complex, but that didn't matter right now. She just needed access.