The Halfling Jack

Even in something as simple as relocation to a new headquarters, the Jericho Energy Corporation wouldn't be the multi-billion-dollar corporation it was if it couldn't overcomplicate things. Since the Manifest Destiny Bill that had come out back in 2085, when all available land on Earth was declared privately owned and the United Nations began offering incentives to corporations to move their business to Luna or Mars, Jericho had been preparing for their departure. Most of the staff had already relocated to Phobos and all that were left on Earth were security and demolition. Demolition was an obvious requirement on site for the final stages of Jericho's move, the company would not receive their stipend until the building came down and the rubble cleared. Security's presence within the skyscraper, the observant may note many more guards than usual, was several measures more complicated.

With so much industry and the corporate workforce making way to automation, as happened to most labor jobs several decades before, Jericho maintained its domination of the energy cell industry though reliance on humanity. No matter how advanced a security system, no matter how heavy a lock or how many extra genes in your Watchdogs, every possible security measure is inherently corruptible. Jericho didn't believe that humans were incorruptible, exactly, just that they were easier to manipulate, and easier to protect against manipulation. A gun turret AI might have state of the art software that can tell everything about a target from dental records to blood types, if it was made professionally, there was a hack on the black market for it. But humans were simple creatures, most would agree that we have changed little in our comparably short time on the planet. We've long ago learned our way around all the little levers in a person's mind, familiarized ourselves with what they do, how to stop them from working, how to exploit them. It was easy to train a person to be mistrustful, to ignore all of the words coming from someone viewed as the enemy. It was also easy to pay someone enough to keep their mouth shut under any circumstances.

A human could obviously be bought in any number of ways, but no one method is going to work for everyone, especially if those people had been trained to resist persuasion. Turning a loyal soldier, even one who's feudal lord is a CEO and who's weapon is a submachine gun, is not a gambit that happens instantly. Ordinary espionage, turning a trusted employee into a mole or a turncoat, takes time and always leaves a trail, whether it be paper or money or memory. The mind of a Jericho guard is one that has long since been sealed shut and made incorruptible through intense training, extravagant pay, intimately personal threats, and a sense of loyalty strong enough to push this man to make the ultimate sacrifice for his company. All it held now was an in-tray for new standing orders and a processing unit built to decode a truly insane system of passwords. Such has the world of commerce evolved so that the only effective trail one can leave in the field of corporate espionage is a trail of blood.

The reason Jericho had so many security guards on the same night as the building's scheduled demolition would've been obvious to any member of the corporate world. The shipment of physical sensitive information would've been far outside the jurisdiction of United Nations All Purpose Law Enforcement and would've been vulnerable to theft by any company that could've afforded a low-gravity starship, if not just an ordinary one. It was simpler and safer, then, to upload the companies most sensitive information, the CEO's personal archives, containing all of the little truths a corporation doesn't show the world, all of the confessions and data from unethical experiments and reprehensible decisions, all of which made Jericho the richest company in the star system, through the ether, directly to its new home on Phobos. Demolition was in place outside the building ready to bring it down, as well as destroy the physical evidence of Jericho's secret practices, as soon as the upload was finished. Publicly, the upload was simply the transfer of critical business secrets of the largest battery supplier in the galaxy, receipts, sales figures and marketing strategies, and to the naked eye, that's what it was. Dig a little deeper, though, and you might just catch sight of a war crime worthy of Nuremberg before Jericho's "lawyers" break down your door and "prevent the release of information".

The upload had been going on for days, despite the immense speed and capacity of such an enormous company. Security was to remain in place throughout the building until just before the commencement of the demolitions. The publicity required by such a massive blip on Earths electromagnetic radar meant that Jericho was now a beacon to all of her rivals, some of whom had HQs on the same street, and more than enough reason to come after whatever Jericho was trying to hide. On the 15th of August 2093, after everything was finally in place and the last few hundred petabits of data were climbing their way to the heavens, security began their routine more alert than in previous weeks. They almost never saw employees anymore, and though nobody said anything, everyone knew that the building would come down soon. Very soon.

The building was separated into sealed-off sections, where the only ways inside or out were by external hover lifts available via the push of a button at specially designated, heavily guarded, areas. The section from which the upload was occurring, and which held the CEO's office was obviously the one at the top, reachable only by helicopter or light-weight starship. The section, one of many, was one sixth of a skyscraper, and with so much ground to cover Jericho had placed over forty guard on this one section alone, as well as two "Watchdogs", grown in Jericho's own illegal science division, which hadn’t been tested indoors, let alone in such a fragile environment as this. The topmost section had all of the ordinary spaces one might expect in an office building, cubicles surrounded by office rooms, a kitchenette, two bathrooms and a modest employee lounge.

Several burly security guards now sat in the employee lounge, loving that their patrol for the night consisted of a single, large room with only two doors. The four guards in this room shared nearly 1200 pounds of muscle and zero hair follicles between them, and each carried or sat next to a firearm that could double as a piece of building foundation. They'd tried playing cards, chatting idly about work and all the usual things, but now each man was simply starring off into different parts of the room. It is unfortunate that, while guard work requires constant vigilance, it is a universal constant that nothing will ever happen during a security guard's shift until they've grown good and complacent. At the same time that one of the guards heard a small thump come from the kitchenette, every other guard shot their gaze to the opposite side of the room, to the door between several rows of cubicles that had just slammed open.

In through the doorway came sprinting a frantic young man in business casual attire, sweating like he'd been doused with a bucket of grease and feverishly looking from the cubicles to the security guards. He was the kind of man the guards had seen less and less of as the night progressed; an employee who'd forgotten something vitally important. Procedure up until 2300 hours was to allow them to search only the cubicle they could present the ID for, then escort them quickly to the hover lifts. Unfortunately, it was now 2335. The procedure at this point was to use any force necessary to get any employee encountered to the hover lifts. "Get", not "escort". An important distinction. Lethal force was also authorized to keep any and all persons away from workstations.

"You need to get your ass to the hover lift!" the guard closest to the man shouted.

"Please! My drive- It has my life's work in it! I can't leave it!" the man begged. He raised his empty hands high above his head. Unfortunately, he did not turn back.

"I said get back!" commanded the first guard, now walking towards the man brandishing his enormous rifle. The Mark 73. The portable gauss cannons. No threat to the rest of the building, or indeed the city at large, the weapons only existed to create a need for Jericho's "anti-gauss plating" aimed at starships. The other guards held identical weapons and followed the first toward their target. Their footsteps fell in sync with the first until his was the only set of footsteps left. Then, suddenly it hit him.

A cross-spike dagger, a weapon made to be driven, was buried all the way to the hilt into the guards temple. Had he the good fortune of turning his body as he fell to the ground dead, he might have seen the corpses of all his fellow guards behind him. He wasn’t that lucky, though, he was dead before the dagger was halfway into his skull. The hand that clutched the hilt of the dagger was encased in old fashioned leather gloves, at least, that's what they looked like. The man was dressed like he didn't care if anyone thought he was a thief, black tactical shirt and trousers, pouches throughout his person filled with gadgets, black wool hat, and a face like a noir villain. He'd recently shaved his face, having grown a beard so that he would've been unrecognizable without it. His name was Vox, and he was a corporate spy.

Vox wiped the dagger's blade with a heavily stained kerchief he took from one of his many pockets. There wasn't any blood on the spike, the thermal core in the center cauterized the wounds to prevent any messy cleanup. The wipe was simply habit, although using the knife on people whose corpses were just going to be left in the building to be demolished anyway was also pointless. Vox was a professional, and professionals didn't lower their standards just because it didn't matter to anyone else. He walked to the other side of the room, to the door the man, who had seemingly disappeared, had apparently come from. Vox picked up the tiny metallic ball on the ground from where it landed, locating it through its active cloaking with an infrared eyepiece, mounted classily to an eyepatch. He'd thrown the device from the safety of an air vent on the other side of the room. One of the guards had nearly caught sight of him making the throw. He was getting old.

Vox replaced the hologram projector in its pouch and strode to the door, ignoring the cubicles. He was a professional, and he knew his prize wouldn't be so easily secured. There were two locks on this door, as there were everywhere in this building. The first was a password input lock that needed to be entered in encryption. This meant that it held 12 layers of code that changed every hour, each character of the password corresponded to various factors within Jericho, that Vox would've needed to be present at staff meetings for the past year to have any hope of deciphering. Thankfully, he had a tool for this. A halfling jack was a large cover designed to sit astride password input terminals, wirelessly tap into the algorithms controlling it, find the parameters the locks believe are acceptable, and press them. "You need to reset your password" the terminal chimed, and the thief heard a deadbolt slide free. Next, Vox checked the keyhole, just in case he could see anything through it. He couldn't. He checked the thresholds for light. Nothing there either. He let his augmented gloves, Ferret Gloves as they were known, extend their wire filaments inside the keyhole, gently prodding the locking mechanism, checking if it is engaged and disengaging it. They had cost a fortune but, thankfully, Vox traded fortunes like children traded baseball cards.

The lock came open with a click, and the wires receded into their housing unit. Vox closed his one eye outside of the eyepatch and watched the screen beneath the patch with the other. One of the filaments had a camera and projected an image. The other side of the door was clear, if a bit exposed, so Vox tentatively passed through it. Active camouflage didn't work on something so big and complicated as a moving person, so Vox was forced to rely on old fashioned methods of stealth. In his heart, Vox liked to think in simple terms. Being a thief, or "corporate spy" as they insisted on calling him, was really all about lurking. You lurked your way through a monitored hallway, and you didn't get seen. You lurked behind an armed guard, and you cut his throat without a sound. You lurked so well that you could lurk your way up to whatever you wanted and lurk back home without anyone ever being the wiser. Vox was the best because he was the best at lurking. He lurked his way up to the guard that had the misfortune to turn on his patrol just before Vox opened the door and stabbed him in the temple. With the thermal core, the dagger slipped in like butter.

Vox lurked his way from one guard to another, knowing he could never finish his mission with these men alive. In truth, he knew these men didn't particularly deserve to go home that night, if they had them. He knew that they'd done things in their line of work that made his quiet, emotionless lobotomies look like mercies. If they had families, they were sure to abuse them, statistics said. Had abused them. They didn't anymore.

The hallway Vox was passing through was dark and it was only thanks to his eyepatch that he didn't just stumble into the guard when he came in. He knew that most of the rooms he passed through on this night would be dark, but that wasn't any more of a problem for the guards as it was for him. The difference was that they were relying on drugs. Always the lesser option when you could use technology instead, because drugs relied on ingredients already present in a person. Technology creates things that are not there, and so while the guards were trying to gauge the right dosage to break through their tolerance without killing them, Vox could see every freckle on the backs of their bald heads.

The hallway was long and didn't contain any other guards. No doubt they had all been patrolling from one end to the other, maximizing their chances of happening upon a thief like Vox. Unfortunately for them, they had underestimated Vox's capacity to lurk, and had come up short in a battle of perceptions one after the other. Vox turned a corner and walked for several moments before seeing his next landmark: a potted plant native to Madagascar. He spotted the Tahina palm several hundred feet away and stopped to marvel that it wasn't even halfway to the end of the hallway. His employers were right to spare no expense in this endeavor. Vox switched his eyepatch to infrared. He could see the water heater that marked the next path as if it was on his side of the wall. All he had to do was break through the drywall here, the only section of drywall in the building that covered a maintenance shaft that led to the floor above without the unpleasantness of meeting guards on stairways.

Vox pulled out his jig saw made quick work of the drywall. Once he finished the alarm in his eyepatch blared that he shouldn't move his torso forward. He froze, blinked the code for a 360 scan around his head. There was a sticky garrot, thinner than spider's silk and stronger than tungsten, made entirely out of instant bond glue. A genuine spider's web. The scan showed an identical garrot waiting behind Vox, expecting him to have jumped back if he'd noticed the first. Very carefully, and only because the eyepatch told him it would be safe, Vox extended his neck as far as it could reach and engaged the eyepatches only security feature. A gout of flame sprayed from the devices band from thirty-two gout placed at equal distances around his head. The garrots were both incinerated, but a new alarm began in Vox's eye. Someone was sprinting towards him. They were getting close, very quickly. They had leapt at him. Vox watched the feet as the interloper's foot came within feet of his skull, no discernible expression on his face. He engaged the security feature again, and he was again transported to

The flames dissipated and Vox looked around manually. The person that had tried to dropkick him was lying motionless on the ground, anchored by a belt suction cup. Vox had only enough time to process that they weren't burnt to a crisp before they jumped up and leapt at him again. Two legs curled back on the body before springing back towards him, followed by a cascade of long black hair. No, not black, multicolored, but of natural hair tones. Vox didn't have to see the wig under a microscope to know that it was real hair that had come from a thousand women. Planter wigs were popular among female thieves. Vox threw his arms up to catch the kicks, and the woman pushed back against his palms, throwing her legs into the air and landing on her hands before righting herself for her next attack. Another thief working this job, Vox thought. Fantastic.

She ran straight up to Vox and held one fist close to her body ready to strike, unafraid and likely having guessed his flamethrower was out of fuel. The eyepatch combat prediction algorithm told Vox which direction the blow was intended to land, and he dodged accordingly. He'd been fighting rivals, bodyguards, security and the occasional assassin since he'd started this job. The eyepatch was a help, certainly, but Vox wasn't about to let some upstart take his best contract in months. He widened his stance and prepared for her next attack.

"Hi!" he said enthusiastically as if he was greeting an old friend. She responded by taking a few steps forward into a leap, spinning, and kicking at Vox's head almost faster than he could react to. He ducked and drove a fist into the side of her knee. She twisted at just the right time to avoid a hyperextension and pushed back to regroup.

"It's just that," Vox continued, "I'm reasonably sure you know me, at least by reputation, but I don't think I've seen your face before."

"I have no idea who you are," she said coldly.

"Yeah, I know," Vox said, "Nobody knows who I am. But you know of me, you know who I am." She looked at him, rage burning behind her eyes, before she said, "The Void."

Vox couldn't have been a thief for long if anybody anywhere had ever seen his face. But Vox was the kind of thief, the prolific sort, who left a fairly wide area completely devoid of anything suspicious in his wake, a trail in the absence of a trail. A void.

This girl must be another spy, he thought, there was no other explanation. As far as he knew, his company was the only one that intended to move against Jericho tonight. He hadn't done the research himself but he trusted it, which left only one explanation. Vox smiled.

"You work for Prometheus, don't you?" The flash of fear in her eye's was gone in an instant. It was all Vox needed.

"I knew it," he growled. "I knew those dipshits would think this job was too big for one man."

"So, there are two of us." she muttered before arguing. "This is the biggest job there's ever been! It's too big for any one person," she spat the word at him. It seemed her mistaking him for another spy hadn't softened her attitude. "Even the bogeyman." Vox chewed on that for a moment, but she wouldn't get through his pride with logic. He was a legend, and legends didn't rely on logic.

"What is your name?" he asked. She stared back.

"My name is Vox, if it makes you feel better about it," he said, giving his real name for the first time in his life. It felt like pulling a tooth out of his spine, but he knew it would happen eventually. The girl still hesitated, but eventually whispered, "Kira."

"Nice to meet you, Kira," Vox said. "Follow me." He disappeared into the maintenance tunnel, and Kira followed, rage temporarily forgotten.

"Where does this lead?" she asked.

"If we're lucky, it'll lead as far as we need to go," Vox answered. Surely, she had the same intel as he did, Prometheus didn't hire amateurs. The maintenance hatches had been unaccounted for in every schematic of this building Vox could find, instead he had to trade mountains of information to learn where to find them. This girl was new at this, relying too heavily on gadgets instead of guile. Vox soon came up against another password protected door and let his halfling jack get to work on it. Sure, gadgets are useful, he thought as the jack whirred. But you still need to be better at thinking things through. "You need to reset your password," the door droned as the lock clicked open. Before he stepped through, he turned back to Kira.

"You shouldn't have attacked me," he said in a school master's voice. She looked him in the eye in defiance.

"I thought you were another-" she began but Vox cut her off.

"Yeah, I know," he said, "but you still shouldn't have attacked another thief. You tail them until they react to you. Even if they spot you they might allow you to follow them all the way to the prize. You can fight them there if you must, but it's better to find some way to kill them quietly. Either way you don't announce your presence." She kept looking at him defiantly but her cheeks did flush according to Vox's eyepatch. No more needed to be said so he walked through the door, protege following after.

After a few minutes of walking in silence, Vox held up a hand. There was a light up ahead. A grinding, sawing noise had also been growing for several moments, so both thieves had already been barely crawling forward. Vox inched closer to the gap in the floor and found that it led straight down for about twelve feet before opening into what appeared to be a storage closet was having a nap in. The absurdities masquerading as DNA in the vat-grown guards meant that this wasn't actively frowned upon by their superiors, but having a snooze beneath a gaping hole was generally a bad idea. Particularly for this man, as Vox had begun attaching his spike-dagger to a retrieval pulley on his belt as soon as he'd seen him. Throwing the dagger with a tether was certainly more challenging than usual but Vox pulled it off, and the weapon lodged in the guard's bare skull. Kira stepped towards him when she heard the sound of metal in meat.

"He wasn't a threat to us," she said accusingly, "You didn't have to kill him."

"I'm sure Jericho will be able to grow another one," Vox said, already moving on. The dagger dislodged from its mark and zipped up to follow him. Kira didn't make any more protests, but Vox could feel her stare on the back of his head. He didn't care, he'd long since ceased thinking of the brutish security guards as people.

"The upload is going to be finished soon," he said after a while to break the silence. "The demo is gonna start right after. Do you have a plan to get out of here?"

"Hover lifts," Kira said.

"Specific one?" Vox asked. "Have you taken care of the guards around it?"

"Yes," she said. "I have an eidetic memory; I know my route back."

"Well how handy for you," he sneered. "Better hope we don't have to go so far that you don't have time."

"How much further do we have to go?" she asked again. Vox held up a hand again. Kira stopped moving and Vox jumped over a section of floor and plunged his dagger into it. He used the thermal core to carve out a hole and let it clatter to the floor in complete disregard of lurking etiquette. "We're here," he said in explanation.

"And why did you let that loud bang happen without knowing what's down there?" Kira asked like she was speaking to a child.

"I do know what's there," Vox said. "It isn't smart, and I would rather it be confused and alarmed." If Kira had any doubts about what he meant, they were assuaged when she heard several sets of growling vocal chords. She knew they came from the same throat. The thought sent an icy chill down her spine. Vox saw the naked terror in her eyes through the eyepatch and confirmed her fears. "Watchdog," he whispered.

"No," she said, nearly trembling.

"The office is on the other side of the room it's guarding. It's our last obstacle," Vox said with resignation.

"No," Kira said with more emphasis. "Have you seen what they put into those things? It will literally tear us to pieces."

"Look," Vox said with what sounded like genuine concern in his voice. "Genetic modification is a lot more miss than hit no matter how much you pay, so Watchdogs are never, never as bad as you think they're gonna be. It's probably just a pit bull weighed down by a skull too big to hold up and a long scary tail. Just treat it like any other fight with a dog and you'll be fine." She didn't seem to be convinced, so he went on.

"I've been doing this for over thirty years now," he said exaggerating only slightly. "I've killed a thousand of these ugly shits and it has never once been difficult. This is the only possible path we can take, which means we have to get through the dog." Her eyes were beginning to shine, and her jaw was set. Vox had pulled confidence from the ether and given it to her. "Now get down there and get to it. I'll be right behind you." And then he did something truly unexpected. He smiled at her.

That did it; Kira was ready. She dropped her legs into the hole and took one last look up at him.

"Right behind you," he said, still smiling. Kira jumped down. On the further side of the room, she saw an enormous pile of muscles and teeth stepping lightly toward her and heard its echoing growl. It didn't look like it had any difficulty moving. Kira looked up at Vox, who was looking pensively into the maintenance shaft.

"You know what," he said, " I think we were supposed to go further. This tunnel probably does go to the main office." Kira stared at him in horror. She looked back to the approaching watchdog and her eye's filled with tears.

"You shouldn't have attacked me," Vox said coldly. By the time Kira looked back up to his position, he had moved on, leaving her to her fate.

. . .

"You need to reset your password," the halfling jack chimed for the penultimate time, and Vox slipped into the former office of Jericho's CEO. The computer uploading the motherload of information was the room's only feature, screen backlit with white and a progress bar. It was nearly filled. With no time to lose, Vox leapt into the desk's chair and used the password jack for the final time on the computer's keyboard. He attached a zip drive to the jack's extension port and began siphoning the information. A second progress bar appeared on the screen, and since this wasn't going to space, it filled much faster. In the 120 seconds or so that it took, Vox ruminated on his victory, Kira's protests at killing the guard and the fate she succumbed to immediately after. It was her own fault for believing he thought she'd come from Prometheus; they would've never sent a second spy. The transfer complete, and two minutes to spare, Vox triumphantly strode towards the door to make his final exit.

The door had relocked. Vox's smile vanished, but he did not lose his stride. He took out the halfling jack and placed it over the door's input, but something wasn't right. "You need to reset your password," came the voice, only this time it came from the halfling jack. Vox's heart froze. The jack didn't come with a password. It seemed to have picked up more than data from the computer. Mounted horror battled with resignation and rage in his mind, Vox looked at the bare steel plating that covered the walls. No seams, it was a single piece of steel shaped into a box. Vox looked back to the nonfunctioning jack, without a keypad, or the time to rig one up, he would be trapped in this room. With the demolition starting any minute. It was only after accepting that his death was imminent, when the progress bar chimed its completion, that maybe he shouldn't have killed that guard.