Page 13 of Hollow Code
The hub was above him. He could see the weatherproof casing on the arm. It was grey and indistinguishable from the standard monitoring equipment surrounding it. That had been the point.
He thought about the day he'd reviewed the installation photos. A crew from Hyperion's field team, all of them thinking they were running telecom redundancy checks, which they were. The secrecy of it all made sense. They were dealing with soldiers. Their lives. It had to be protected.
Gideon had watched the timestamps roll in on his monitor in Vancouver, verifying the placement and logging the confirmation personally. It had felt damn fucking good. In some ways, it still did.
He still didn’t know what Finch was up to. If he opened his mouth now, his signature on that NDA wouldn’t destroy him. It would cage him. He couldn't let that happen. He had no idea when he'd feel he'd done enough sabotage. When Finch would have suffered enough for kicking Gideon to the curb. He only knew that it would have to end before it ended him.
After that, Gideon had no idea what his life would look like. Maybe he'd stay living off grid. It wasn't all that bad.
Except for the lack of gaming… and Hopper. He missed Hopper.
He reached up and opened the housing. Pulling the toolkit from the side pocket of his backpack, he got to work performing a soft shutdown. He needed the system logs to be seen as a failure event. Not something suspicious.
He had eleven minutes before the guard vehicle came back around. Mistakes were not an option. He was four minutes in when he glanced up and saw a shadow move, low and slow, on the substation roof.
His breathing hitched, yet his hands persisted in their task of covertly disabling the node.
The shadow crept forward, then went still. There was only one thing it could be, and that was a human.
He adjusted his position slightly, putting the tower strut between himself and the roofline.
The shadow made a distinct movement and, like magic, transformed into a body. Not a full one, but he could see someone make a hand gesture.
Shit.
Gideon eased around to the other side and peered through the opening in the tower.
Another person hid behind a small shed to the east of the man on the roof. And one more just northwest of that position in the brush.
And slightly off to the south, there was one behind all of them, rifle in hand. He assumed they all had weapons, but this one showed theirs.
Four hostiles. Armed. Coming for him and his only option was to run north, across open land, jump the fence, and pick up the trails on the other side of the access road. His chances weren’t good.
He might as well finish the job before they either captured him or killed him. Too bad this wasn’t a primary hub where he could do some real damage.
He finished reprogramming the node from the inside using his small tablet, timing it to go offline in eighteen minutes. Theoretically, that would have given him enough time to find a spot, open his laptop, and pull data as it hit the node. At least, that’s what he was hoping.
But it wasn’t going to happen today.
Snagging his pack, he pulled out his handgun. Wasn’t really going to help much in this situation, but he wasn’t giving up either. He took a deep breath. Getting caught was something he’d always expected. He just didn’t think it would be like this.
Preparing to run, he stuck his head out from behind the strut, just so he could see the angles.
Pop. Pop.
First two shots came from the roof.
Pop.
A groan. A crash. And then a thud.
Gideon stole a glance toward the building, and the man who’d been on the roof was now on the ground. Legs bent in an odd direction. Arms sprawled wide. Blood seeping into the ground.
Two more rounds. A brief pause, then another three rounds.
Gideon didn't know their origin, though, he could no longer assume they were all aimed at him. It didn’t make sense, but he also wasn't about to stand around figuring it out. He now had another option. The substation was thirty meters out. He could sprint for it. Dodge the bullets. Maybe. And if he reached it, the fence was close, and the cover was solid enough to give him a shot.
Now or never. He held his weapon to the side of his thigh and took off running, zig-zagging, his backpack tight against his spine.
