Page 17 of Last Chance to Save the World (Chaotic Orbits #3)

17

I don’t stop until Mars.

I take the short portal across the solar system, using the codes my mother helped me acquire. I get far enough away, in other words, that I could tell Rian my exact location and he wouldn’t be able to get to me in at least a week, and then only if he were lucky.

I didn’t just sit there while in the portal. Of course. I had work to do.

First thing first: Extract all the data from my earring.

I spent a shit ton of cash on these suckers, and I had to leave one behind in Fetor’s server room. Worth it, I suppose, since jamming the post into the nanobot programmer enabled my code to overwrite his. Eventually, maybe, someone will notice a random stray earring. But I’m already half a solar system away.

The other earring?

Far more valuable.

This was the thing I got out of the red telephone, after hiding it there at the gala. Rian had the right idea but the wrong execution. He thought that I was going to steal the red phone, and that I needed Fetor to move it to a less-secure location for me to do that.

That was never the plan.

The plan was to hide this earring in the phone, something that took me only seconds, thanks to its narrow design. I planted it while still at the gala at the Museum of Intergalactic History.

Its tiny size was why the earring was so expensive in the first place. It’s a wireless scanner and recorder. And before I put it in the red telephone from NASA, I had it programmed to scan for a specific code.

This is where the plan fell to luck and timing, but for once, I actually did get lucky here. I got the phone to Fetor, who took my suggestion to put it in the communication room. And with the scanner in the room, it had time to infiltrate the system and copy every line of code I would need to break in to the entire communications network.

It took me the entire journey from Earth to Mars to parse it out, and there are bits that I’m still not sure about. I’d already written several programs to help extract the data I needed, though, and that helped speed the process along.

When I reach Mars, the first thing I do is line up a portal code. Just in case Rian has people out here, in this remote corner of the system. It’s unlikely, but . . .

The next thing I do is hack in to security feeds.

See, people don’t realize how much of a role communication networks play. All the cam drones? They don’t store the data they record. It travels via communication networks into a server that’s backed up remotely to other servers.

The communication network is a road that will take me through any locked door.

Top of the list: Strom Fetor’s security-access feeds. Once I get into the comm sys, it’s surprisingly easy to bring up all the footage.

Rian and I were spotted in the communication room, but Fetor didn’t know we’d made a stop in the server room. And now he never will. I scrub all the records of Rian accessing the room and delete the video feeds of me—in my blinding-white flare threads—inside it. I also track down the footage from the stairwell and slice that out, too. By the time I’m done, I have laid the digital groundwork for a perfectly normal visit to the towers. And, more important, all the plausible deniability Rian will need when Fetor inevitably figures out that someone has reprogrammed the bots he intended to be a cash cow for the rest of Earth’s history.

I am absolutely certain that Fetor’s simply not intelligent enough to link me to any of this, especially if I clear Rian. The man has many enemies, corporate and personal. But he does hire smart people, and so I have little doubt that eventually, my name will be one of the few remaining on his list of suspects. Maybe then he’ll finally believe I actually really hate him.

I don’t delete the footage of me in the communication room.

Maybe I should. Pride before a fall and all that.

But I like the idea of him searching and searching, not knowing who reprogrammed the bots, until some overworked and underpaid person presents him with a shot of me extracting the earring from the red telephone he so graciously put on a pedestal right in front of me.

He’ll never make this public. He’ll never admit to the galaxy how easy it was for me to strip him of the very data that turned him from a billionaire to a trillionaire.

And by the time he realizes it was me, I’ll be a ghost.

Untraceable.

If Fetor was a more intelligent man, he’d look into using messenger pigeons in the future.

Once I ensure Fetor Tech has no damning evidence of what we did, I go into the government records. It takes longer to break into them, but they have the same flaw. Everything goes through the comm network.

I meticulously root out every iteration of me and my mother and delete it. Then I go into all the records of Green Rogue—what a ridiculous code name for the movement— and seed in plenty of lies, misinformation, and false leads to give everyone a bit of cover for the next few years.

My mother didn’t approve of the risk I was taking to get access to the communications system. But she extricated me anyway, blowing her cover and cashing in all the goodwill she’s built for decades to aid me.

Least I can do in return. Besides, next time, I can charge her more. Maybe I’ll even toss a little spy bot to her underground network on the house. I’m feeling generous these days.

I crack my knuckles as I lean back in my chair. Through the carbonglass window, I can see the round, red curvature of Mars. Closer to me is the portal.

It’s time to disappear forever.