Chapter 16: The Rogue Server Sweep

Kaelen's POV

I was standing in the mud beside the boundary of Port Campbell property, the rain passing straight through the shoulders of my coat.

Behind me, three black Range Rovers, their engines running, made a low rumbling noise in the thick fog.

The red warning lights reflected off the damp trees as Devlin and four armed corporate security technicians searched the premises with their handheld RF signal trackers.

I curled my hands into tight fists and kept them deep in my coat pockets. The cold reached my knuckles, but I hardly noticed it. All the blood in my body rushed toward the small cottage which was fifty yards away in the gloom.

She was inside. Valkyrie.

Together with the child who had troubled every moment I was awake this morning.

"Mr. Vance," Devlin called, stepping with care over a mess of damp brush by the back shed, "I've got a local thermal reading. The signal which was behaving erratically wasn't coming from inside the main cottage."

I turned slowly as my boots sank into the wet mud.

"What are you talking about?"

"The Aegis buy orders," Devlin said, “the server that carried out the automated counter-payload on your Maybach's dashboard, the burst transmission knocked out the local transformer. But the directional antenna isn't on the house; it's hidden in the roofline off that old pump shed."

Marcus moved up next to me, automatically placing his hand on the firearm tucked beneath his tactical jacket.

"Kaelen, let the team go through and clear the shed first; if there's an automated purge procedure, it might have been set up with a physical destruction charge."

"No," I growled and walked past him. "No one else is allowed to touch that equipment except me."

"Kaelen"

"Stay back!" I shouted, my voice sliced through the silent clearing like a whip.

Marcus froze in place.

Devlin struggled to swallow and then lowered his head, moving his technicians back towards the perimeter line.

I walked through the tall grass, looking straight at the rusted iron door of the pump shed. A worn brass padlock dangled loose from the latch and was unlocked already. Someone must have been in here recently. In fact, someone had been there very recently.

I pushed the door open as it creaked loudly.

Inside, I could smell hot solder, the insulation of electric wire, and the sharp smell of battery acid

From an exposed wooden rafter hung a single fluorescent light powered by a battery, producing a white light over the temporary workstation.

It was not the kind of arrangement you'd find in a company environment, since there were no sleek aluminium towers or special cooling systems.

It was a makeshift thing.

Three industrial server blades, which had been taken from old telecommunication racks, were fitted inside an insulated wooden fruit crate and connected directly to four heavy-duty batteries, while copper cooling pipes passed through the bucket of melting ice placed on the dirty floor.

The phantom which had knocked Vance Global's market capitalisation into decline was the result of brilliant and desperate engineering, put together from scrap parts and pure intellect in a neglected fishing village.

I moved closer a bit, my leather boots making a crunching sound on the loose gravel.

On the workbench was a small black spiral notebook, opened to a page containing closely drawn, hand-drafted schematics. The handwriting was clearly that person's, consisting of slanted, elegant, and accurate loops written in dark blue ink.

Valkyrie’s handwriting.

Next to the notebook was a porcelain mug with a crack, still emitting a slight amount of steam from a freshly poured black tea.

A few minutes before we opened the gate, she was in the cold, keeping a close eye on the trades herself, shaking in the dark and weighing up the stock buybacks against the electrical demand of her sister's oxygen machine.

"You absolute fool," I whispered in the silent room, my chest filled with a blend of suffocating anger and a terrible, genuine grief that nearly made me collapse to my knees. "You've ruined us both to save them..."

I looked downwards at the central terminal screen which was on the crate.

The monitor was flickering quickly, displaying one after another lines of self-deleting commands.

Crimson red text scrolled over the dark screen like rain falling:

FLUSHING CACHE….

DELETING HOST KEYS….

OVERWRITING ALLOCATION TABLES….

"Devlin!" I shouted, turning towards the doorway.

"Come in here! Halt the wipe!"

Devlin rushed into the shed, dropping his bag onto the dirt floor as he took the keyboard. "It's a hard-coded kill switch, sir! As soon as the main power line failed, an internal capacitor began a three-minute shred routine!"

“I don't care what it is; save the transaction ledger!” I said, grabbing Devlin by the collar of his jacket and pulling him within inches of my face, my eyes filled with deadly intent.

"That ledger shows she didn't sell the core framework four years ago! It shows who bought those shares! Save it!"

"I'm trying! I'm trying!" Devlin shouted, his fingers racing across the mechanical keys frantically and dazzlingly. "The master encryption key is held in a secondary hardware token! Without the physical bypass key, the whole drive will destroy its own flash memory in forty seconds!"

"Where is the bypass token?" I asked, looking around desperately.

"It's a security dongle that works without being connected to a grid!" Devlin gasped, sweat running down his face despite the freezing air.

"She must have carried it with her or hid it close to the central circuit... Wait!"

The image on Devlin's screen stopped. The text that had been scrolling came to an abrupt halt.

A high-pitched tone sounded through the internal speaker.

The screen emptied out, showing only a high-definition video feed that was being live-streamed directly from an encrypted camera positioned somewhere on the front porch of the cottage outside.

The front door of the cottage creaked open on the screen.

A tall man stepped out onto the porch, holding a medical bag in his left hand, wearing a dark, wet oilskin coat.

Dr. Hamish Croft.

His face was serious, his eyes devoid of the gentle, kindly warmth he normally showed.

He reached into his jacket, pulling out a small silver flash drive emitting a constant blue LED light placing it directly in front of the camera lens.

Devlin breathed sharply, leaning forward towards the monitor.

"Mr. Vance... that is the master bypass token! He has the physical key!"

The speaker on the server terminal gave a quiet burst of static as soon as I tried to move.

Hamish's voice came in through the small speaker, clear, cold, and completely unbothered by the rain.

"I knew your security team would find the pump shed first, Kaelen," Hamish said through the speaker, staring straight into the camera lens on the screen. "Because you've always been predictable; you've been looking for algorithms rather than looking at the people who were suffering right in front of you."

"Croft," I snarled, moving up to the monitor, my voice dark and thick. "If you touch that drive...."

"If I erase this drive, the evidence clearing Valkyrie's name will be lost forever," Hamish interrupted smoothly, a cold and bitter smile appearing on his lips as he looked at the screen.

"Then your mother wins. Valkyrie is still a wanted corporate criminal, and you a blind fool."

"What do you want?" I asked, clenching my fists so tightly my nails scraped into my palms.

Hamish whispered, lowering his voice to a deadly silence, "Valkyrie and the boy are leaving Port Campbell tonight on a vessel that I have arranged."

"You are to walk out of this shed, get back into your cars, and drive back to Melbourne. If your tires go over the threshold of the gate in front of that cottage before their boat has crossed international waters, I will drop this drive into the ocean and activate the oxygen pump safety override in Chloe's room."

The air in my throat turned to ash.

The cottage door opened wider behind Hamish.

Valkyrie stepped out into the rain with a small duffel bag, holding Lachlan closely against her chest.

Lachlan looked straight at the trees where the pump shed was hidden, his eyes settling directly on the camera lens.