The Forgotten Planet
Chapter 21 – Picking Ourselves Up By Our Bootstraps

It was our third night on the ship, and Vee and I were staring at the ceiling and I was catching my breath after a rousing bout of trust building. We trusted the hell out of each other. At this point, I think we trusted each other implicitly. Ok, I think I’ve dragged out this euphemism about as far as I’m willing to. You get the picture.

I was just starting to get sleepy when she asked, “How did you and Adan end up becoming criminals?”

“It’s... complicated,” I answered carefully.

“I’m sure it is,” she answered in a way that implied that I was supposed to explain anyway.

I tried a different tact. “I don’t really like talking about myself.”

“I know,” she answered. “You seem to use sarcasm to deflect, especially with your brother.”

“Is it that obvious?”

Vee didn’t answer. Instead, she rolled onto her side, put her head down on my chest and stared up at me with those stunning green eyes.

I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

“Do you have somewhere else to be?”

There was nowhere I would have rather been, but I didn’t say it. Too soon. “Okay,” I started, “so we called the cops after Martel left, but it took them hours to arrive. In the meantime, we had Avery – who had a ragged bite on his calf, a concussion and an angry teenager starring down at him with a pipe wrench and steel-toed boots.

“So he talked?” Vee asked.

“Oh, he sang,” I answered. “We found out a number of interesting facts: the names of the men involved in the raid, the crime boss they served under, addresses, girlfriends, personal vices. Adan proved to be an extremely thorough interrogator. By the time the officer arrived to work the scene, Avery was begging to be taken into custody. The cop didn’t even bother cuffing his supposed prisoner when he took Avery away. He obviously knew the crime family Avery worked for.”

“You’re probably lucky he didn’t arrest you and your brother,” Vee said.

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed. “I think he felt sorry for us. We were orphans and I was an emotional mess. He was actually the one that told us we’d better start running, and the sooner the better.”

“You had to leave your home?” Vee asked.

“That night,” I answered. “First, we buried Pop and Fergus under an old oak tree that overlooked the Jensen River. It was a shady place where we’d eaten our lunches on hot days and we thought it was a fitting final resting place.”

I had to swallow hard a few times before continuing. Vee craned her neck so she could give me a kiss on the cheek, and I found my voice again.

“I wanted to do something for Clown as well,” I continued, “but burial didn’t seem quite right. Paul’s final round passed through Clown’s eye socket and shredded his positronic brain, so there was no hope of repairing him. Instead, I recycled as many of his parts as I could. He still survives after a fashion inside of Betty.”

“That’s sweet Tiger. No wonder she means so much to you.”

“We sold the vineyard to the neighboring property owner,” I continued. “The guy had us over a barrel and he knew it. He’d been a friend of Pop’s, but that didn’t seem to make any difference when it came to finances. We ended up getting pennies on the dollar for the vineyard, but Adan insisted on keeping the deed to the house. I knew we’d never return, but hermano held out hope for years.”

“The sale money and Pop’s savings gave us some money to live on, but we knew it wouldn’t last forever. We had to replace some way of generating an actual income. Outside of farm work, the only legal work we were qualified for were sweatshop jobs in the city’s destitute housing quarter.”

“Couldn’t you have put your tech skills to work in the professional district?” Vee asked.

“Well, I had the skills to do just that,” I answered, “but I was only ten, so it’s doubtful anyone would have even interviewed me. And if the Vox got a clear idea of my intellectual ceiling, I’d have been sold to a state think-tank.”

“Yeah, I see the problem,” Vee said. “I’m guessing turning to crime was Adan’s idea?”

I smiled. “Mine actually.”

“At ten years old?” I nodded. “Tiger, you’re just full of surprises.” She traced a loose circle with her nail on my chest, and I shivered. “So, what did you start with?”

“I hit a Vox bank,” I answered.

Her head popped of my chest, and suddenly we were face-to-face. “You’re kidding, right.”

“Nope,” I answered. “I almost got away with the money too. Two more minutes and I would have.”

“I figured it was jacking wrister-data or skimming card readers.” Her head tipped sideways, and she squinted at me. She propped up on her elbow, and my eyes started to drift to the places that were no longer covered with a sheet. She grabbed my chin and steered my eyes back to hers. “Tiger, you really hit a Vox bank and lived to tell about it?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “With a 16-terabyte quad-core processor and a teenaged accomplice.”

Vee made a sound in the back of her throat that made the hairs at the back of my neck stand up, and then she suggested somewhat aggressively that we needed to take a brief break from the storytelling.

...

“Ok, so where were we?” Vee asked. She was on her back with her hands resting casually behind her head. I was too winded to answer. She looked over at me and smiled as she said, “We’ve got to up that cardio my man.” I nodded. “I can think of ways...” I nodded more vigorously.

“I could use a Servine cardiovascular system,” I finally said between pants.

“Technically, I’m a weaponized super-soldier,” she answered conversationally. “It’s sort of like your brother’s black-market nerve juicing, but with a lot less butchery.”

“Oh, that’s just not fair,” I replied.

“Life’s not fair Tiger,” she said, “but I’m not a bad consolation prize.” She gave my earlobe a gentle bite and settled back into place. “So, Vox banks...”

When my shudder passed, I said, “Ok, so I might be skipping ahead a little. The bank was my first cash job, but I hacked a bunch of stuff first. And before that I did quite a bit of technical reading as well as some historical stuff like the Hackers Manifesto. This was in a studio apartment in Hialeah by-the-way. It’s where we relocated after we left home.”

“I don’t know Hialeah,” Vee replied.

“You’re not missing anything,” I answered. “Crumbling apartments stacked too close together, dirty air from all the factories, lots of crime – which actually helped us I suppose, since Adan joined a gang a few days after we moved in.”

“They were a bunch of punk kids basically, doing smash-and-grabs, conning folks out of their disposable income and fighting little turf wars over territorial rights with neighboring gangs. I stitched him up more than once with a sewing needle that I’d sanitize with bathtub rum and a Bunsen burner. A few weeks of that and I decided that he wouldn’t make it past his teenaged years if I didn’t do something drastic.”

“A Vox bank is certainly drastic,” Vee replied.

“Yeah, well, I’d just finished reading Neuromancer and I thought I was a real-life console cowboy.”

“A what?” Vee asked.

I shook my head, “It’s just a term from an old cyberpunk novel. It’s like a weaponized hacker, I guess. A black hat for hire.”

“It does sound sort of familiar,” she answered. She rolled over on her side and began to run a hand through my buzzed hair. I would have started purring if I was physically capable of it. “Continue,” she added.

“Anyway, it kind of fired me up. So, after hacking into the local air-traffic control, the city’s fusion reactor and every private server within a twelve-block radius, I got this really bad idea.”

“Robbing a bank.”

“Yep,” I answered. “The plan was pretty good too, but I didn’t count on Vox banks having a dedicated death-squad on call. On top of that, I sort of underestimated the in-house white hats. While I was bouncing a few million credits through a bunch of different banks and shell corporations, they triangulated my location and sent said death-squad to the server room.”

“How’d you get in the server room?” Vee asked.

“From the ceiling air ducts in the men’s room,” I answered. “I was ten and barely weighted thirty kilos. Adan just gave me a boost to get in, and I used a rope to in. I was back up the rope and crawling to safety by the time the soldier-boys broke down the door to the server room. Adan and I left the bathroom and got in line to speak to a teller. While half the city’s police force was scouring the neighborhood for adult hackers, we were getting turned down for a home-equity loan. At least I got a free doughnut out of it.”

“Where did the money end up?” Vee asked.

“Eventually? A bank account that looked like it could have been Martel’s.”

Vee smiled sinisterly. “You didn’t?”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to cover my tracks. I could never safely claim the money, so I improvised. I pushed it around for a few months and watched for heat,” I said. “The white hats working for the Vox were good, but they left clues behind. Once Adan and I were ready to move against Martel’s crew, I moved the money into an account at the bank I knew his people used. Then I started passing the account number around to his people by way of a few mysterious text messages. It was overkill, really.”

Vee raised her eyebrows slightly. “How so?”

“Adan is surprisingly good at thinking up revenge schemes – once you get past the silly ideas like dropping a piano on his head or greasing his stairs – and it turned out I was pretty good at organizing them. We already knew from Avery that Paul was a lieutenant in the Zamboni crime family. What we discovered – with a little digging through a few poorly protected servers and with the occasional well-placed bribe – was that Paul was brash and arrogant and rocking the family boat a bit. He was pushing hard to run more aspects of the syndicate and had pissed-off some of the old guard. We used that existing dynamic to our advantage.”

“On the ground, Adan and a few out-of-town hires pressed into territories that neighbored Paul’s and started mucking around in other lieutenant’s illegitimate business interests. I led a similar assault electronically, and we both left clues leading back to Paul’s involvement. By the time we were done with him the Vox and his own organization were competing with each other for the chance to kill him. Unfortunately, he skipped town before the hit squads converged on him.”

“And you lost his trail until now?”

“No, that was only the first time. The guys got a sixth-sense when it comes to saving his own skin. The fourth and final time we lost him I saw his face through the window of the space elevator. He was leaving on the last car of the day and there was no way to follow.”

“I’ll go with you Galen, if you’d like me to,” Vee said.

“You’d do that?” I asked. She nodded. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could answer. “I appreciate that, but this is something Adan and I need to do alone.” I owed him that. We’d been planning this for a decade.

“I understand,” she said. “I just wanted you to know.” She ran her claws playfully over my chest again and asked, “Were you ever been tempted to hit a bank again?”

“Sure, tempted,” I replied. “Sometimes ignorance is a positive, you know? Now that I know all the possible problems with a bank heist...”

“Yeah, not knowing that you can’t do something is super-important,” Vee said. “Like, say, a point-to-point wormhole generator. Did you know that the Kaldonians have been saying that one was impossible for as long as my people have been in contact with them?”

“Nope,” I answered. That was actually pretty interesting, considering that the Kaldonians were the most technologically advanced species in the galaxy. I filed that one away for future reference.

Vee yawned, showing off her fierce canines. “Five-minute warning Tiger,” Vee said, “and then its cuddle time. And I call the inner spoon.”

Which I was fine with. Outer spoon has better hand-placement opportunities.

“Ok, so the truncated version,” I said. “Once Adan knew what I could do with a keyboard, we started pulling jobs together. The next few years I focused on private individuals rather than the institutions they worked at. Maybe we couldn’t knock over a bank, but I found that I could rob the pants off their elitist employees fairly easily. I figured anyone getting rich off the Vox were part of the problem, and I was this world’s Phiber Optic standing up to the man. I attacked their systems head-on with probability scanners, I mined their passwords with packet sniffers and infected their rigs with homemade root kits.”

“If that failed, we figured out all sorts of cons in order to get pass codes, bank account numbers or even a physical access to the target’s personal rig. All the while I searched the digital world for any sigh of Martel. As soon as I’d replace him, we’d drop everything, pack our bags and give chase.”

I stopped talking at that point because Vee’s eyes were closed, and she was beginning to softly snore. I yawned as I maneuvered into the outer spoon position, and was out the second my hands were properly positioned.