Free The Daedalus Code by Colin F. Barnes Page B

won’t get passed the security.”
    “Send us one of your IDs then. You need backup.”
    “I’ll be there way before you will, and this stuff…it’s dangerous. I’d hate for you to—”
    “It’s sweet that you care about my well-being, but damn it, Mouse, we’re agents. Now do as you’re damn well told and sort us out. When you get there, wait for backup, you hear me?”
    Mouse sighed, sent her two fake IDs with high-level security clearance.
    “Don’t blame me if this goes bad,” he said. “I did warn you.”
    “Your caveat is noted. We’ll see you shortly.”
    She cut the connection off, and Mouse pushed the FT as fast as it would go in its diminished state. He couldn’t wait for the agents, or risk them getting involved. He had to do this himself.
    His hacked ID got him through security again, and he soon navigated across town until he came to the old, abandoned tower. From the outside it looked like just that: dark windows, many boarded up, heavy locks on the steel blast doors within the glass walkways that connected it to the other towers.
    And yet, even from within the FT, he could sense something inside. Maybe it was the rumble of all that computing power, or perhaps it was just the growing paranoia. He activated his near-field scanners, docked the FT to the empty parking platform, and made his way into the transit tunnel.
    So far nothing showed on his scans. No Internet, DarkNet, or MeshNet traffic. It was a complete dead zone. It made his head swim. A world without information! For a moment he had to stop, compose himself. The feeling of falling nearly overcame as he considered the rest of his life as a void. It didn’t bear thinking about.
    After a few moments, he pulled out of the scan result, shook his head and focused on the task at hand with renewed purpose. He couldn’t let this continue to happen. He had to find a way to stop it.
    The transit tunnel was similar to most others—a connecting walkway with glass walls and ceiling from one tower to the next—but this one had a very specific difference. Overlaid on his augmented-reality HUD was an encrypted digital trail.
    He missed it at first, but with the complete data blackout, he managed to barely notice it.
    Tiny packets of encrypted data stretched out across the tunnel and through the blast doors. A trail…maybe from one of the kids…from Ariadne…
    Sprinting now, Mouse reached the doors and ran his lock-picking program. There were no tumblers to manipulate on these kinds of locks, only multiple, interlocking firewalls. His program counted five such obstacles, and was soon scanning its local library of access codes. He tapped his foot as he waited.
    Negative. No known codes. Damn.
    He couldn’t wait around for the agents; he had to get in now.
    Remotely accessing his secure data storage facility where he kept certain information and scraped-data of the DarkNet, he searched for the make and model of the lock. Again nothing. This was new, unique. He’d have to do it the old-fashioned way and get his hands dirty.
    Taking a section of flattened tungsten with a thin, flat nose and a rubberized handle, he wedged it into the cover of the lock and prized the panel off, revealing the CPU and its various mechanisms.
    Tracing the circuitry, he identified the main I/O bridge and wired it to his PR. Looking at the base-level code, he could see it was new and advanced. It had multiple fail-safes and wouldn’t be a trivial thing to recode, but he’d certainly try. And then he thought about those data packets left in the PR overlay. Taking them and dropping them into his decryption command box, he waited for the results as the layers of encryption were stripped away.
    “Clever girl!” he said as the display showed the data packets were actually a series of 256-bit codes. When he compared them with the operating system of the lock, he realized that whoever had left them behind did so to aid their entry. He took the code from the data packets,