Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 64: Backdoor (Patreon)

“What the hell just happened here?!” Lina asked.

“A Trojan,” I breathed out. Words came hard; I had to push each one out of my chest. “In the article. An infected link.”

Lina froze. I watched her eyes widen with understanding. Her face went noticeably pale.

“I opened it myself,” she said.

“Well, apparently brains are harder to hack than hardware,” I said.

The pressure in my chest eased a little, and I even tried to sit up.

It didn’t work.

I carried on from the floor.

“The portals,” I said. “Better switch them off.”

Lina nodded and headed to the control desk, which was essentially just another tablet.

“No!” I shouted. “Better let Adam do it. You didn’t read that article, did you?”

I had no idea how the Trojan worked. I doubted it had stayed in Lina’s head, but it was better not to risk it.

Adam shook his head, but I decided to go further.

“Not from the desk,” I said. “Better just cut the power. Do you know how?”

“Yes,” he answered, and went straight to a panel on the platform, behind which a row of switches for the different power supplies was hidden. He switched them all off.

“The Bureau,” Lina said. “We have to report this!” She waved her hands in the air again, scrolling through her interface.

While she was sorting that out, I sat up. And immediately drifted. Weakness and hunger rolled over me in a wave. Not ordinary ‘I could eat something’ hunger, but a ravenous urge to devour. My body screamed for energy.

That's why Fours couldn’t use an aura. It was far too energy-draining for them.

Good thing I’d just had a cup of Old Well. Not the ideal choice, but it would help my qi recover faster, and I could deal with the calories myself. I reached into my pocket, pulled out an energy bar, tore off the wrapper and bit into the peanuts and sweet nougat. My jaws seemed to have their own power supply. My body was exhausted, but they were threshing away like a combine harvester.

I glanced at the severed head, which Adam was trying to pull off the sword by bracing his foot against the stump of the neck, then at the demon’s arm, and froze at an idea.

“Adam!” I called. “Check the arm. Please tell me there’s a ring under the armour.”

Adam left the head and sword for a moment and crouched by the arm.

“Greedy for trophies?” he asked cheerfully, and joked: “If so, I’m claiming about thirty per cent. After all, I was the one who struck the final blow.”

“To hell with the trophies!” I barked. “There might be a portal in there!”

Adam didn’t understand me.

“We’ve got minutes, maybe seconds, before the demons cut it off from the network.”

“We can…” Adam abruptly put his hand on the gauntlet. “The pocket!”

He grabbed the arm with both hands, pulled the armour off into his own spatial pocket, tore a black ring off the finger and tossed the stump aside. He concentrated, clumsily sorting through the contents. I could feel Space Qi spreading out from him.

Adam was rubbish at it, but it was enough.

“Got it!” he shouted. “I’m almost a hundred per cent sure, but I’d need to take it out to…”

Lina cut him off.

“Don’t do that! We don’t need an army of demons in here.”

“Call Novak!” I ordered. “We haven’t got a nuclear bomb on us anyway.”

“He’s not on Earth. That needs null-link, and we don’t know what else that Trojan can do; maybe it doesn’t just…”

“We’ll risk it!” I said firmly.

Lina’s gaze met mine, and she gave in, nodded and started waving her hands in the interface again.

“Fine,” she said, “but first I’ll take some security precautions. The portal won’t be much use if I bring down our null-link system.”

Waving her hands in the air, tapping out commands on an invisible keyboard, she walked out.

Adam and I watched her go. I kept chewing, and he asked, “A bomb?”

“To throw into the portal,” I explained.

“I thought we’d lure their assault team into a trap.”

“Too slow,” I disagreed. “And not as reliable.”

Adam shook his head uncertainly.

While Lina was gone, Adam finally took the sword's head off. Without asking, he wiped the blade on his trouser leg and laid it down beside me.

I didn’t waste strength on a ‘thank you’, especially since my mouth was busy with a second bar.

Adam turned the head over, holding it by the horns. The helmet was mostly black, with two purple lines that were cut by the narrow slit of the visor, but continued up onto the forehead and coloured the armour on the horns completely. Something like the two stripes that run from a sports car’s bonnet over the windscreen onto the roof.

I was sure this helmet had belonged to one of Ghaurzakh’s guards — the Six who fought with a huge two-handed sword with plenty of notches along the blade.

Adam tried to shake the head out of the helmet, but even though it was metal, it held firm. Adam didn’t bother with the fastenings and removed the metal the same way as the gauntlet: through his spatial pocket.

The face was a reddish grey, twisted by the last brutal moments of its struggle for life and by pain. Black lips had frozen, baring sharp teeth. The horns weren’t purple, of course, but they had a curious tint that hinted at it.

With a grimace like that, he’d be hard to identify even with Aoran’s photos.

Adam lowered his head and couldn’t help himself; he delved into the ring again.

“Don’t take anything out!” I stressed.

“I’m just looking. There’s… God, there’s a lot in here. This pocket’s enormous! It must be the size of this hall.”

That was impressive, especially since an object's shape in a pocket didn’t matter, only its volume.

“Armour,” Adam said. “Two spare sets. Weapons: swords, swords, a glaive, two glaives, a heap of spikes of every shape and size, discs, toothed discs…” Adam stopped. “No idea what that is.” He squinted. “Little bottles. Lots of little bottles. Ampoules, pills, crystals. Rations, water, some scrolls or plates. Can’t make out what…”

Footsteps pounded in the corridor. Lina burst into the hall almost as fast as I did when I expected the attack.

Adam and I both got ready to fight, but Lina waved us off, dived for the switch panel, flicked them all on, and reported, “Ready, Master.”

Adam and I relaxed, but not much. There was a small chance horns would come out of the portal again, and I was almost empty. I couldn't tell whether the few drops of qi I’d recovered in those few dozen seconds would be enough.

An unarmoured hand appeared from the portal, and I relaxed. Novak stepped out of the membrane.

He quickly looked around the hall, stepped toward Adam, and held out his palm. Adam put the ring in it.

“Good work,” he said, picked up the head by a horn and went back into the portal.

The membrane dissolved, and Lina flicked the switches again.

“There go our trophies,” Adam said.

“If it makes the demons weep, I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m starving, who’s with me?”

The two high-calorie bars had vanished into my stomach without a trace. My offer wasn’t entirely an offer; I needed someone to cook, because I had no strength. So Adam fried eggs: lots of eggs and lots of bacon.

He and Lina even got some. Though Lina didn’t so much eat as monitor the news.

While we’d been fighting off our horned guest, two more attacks had occurred. One led to another rehabilitation centre, where the technicians reacted quickly, and the portal let through only three demons. With an unbelievable number of casualties, they were overwhelmed, literally buried under bodies.

The attack on the Valparaíso hub succeeded.

So now we had two domes in big cities of over a million people and one in a nuclear wasteland that had once been a valley for rest and recovery.

There were no more attacks. As soon as Lina reported to the Bureau, hackers took down the site with the Trojan and stopped the advertising mailshot spreading the link.

Before I’d finished my bacon, Lina told us that Novak advised us to put the news on. It was obviously important, since he’d used null-link to give that advice.

There was no television in the kitchen, so we moved; I only took my plate of unfinished eggs with me.

Adam switched on the television.

A new random studio, a new presenter. Novak hadn’t said to switch on any particular channel. Instead of a worried look, this one wore a grin from ear to ear. You might have thought the invasion had been repelled.

“…less than a minute ago! Preliminary data indicate a nuclear device.”

Footage came up from the same camera that had filmed the first mushroom cloud over the highway. You might have thought it was a replay, if not for the burnt-out fields and the still-abandoned cars. The mushroom over them was fresh.

“The cause of the explosion is currently unknown,” the presenter was saying. “It clearly wasn’t an orbital strike. Command is declining to comment. However, according to our information, clean-up teams entered the blast zone immediately after the explosion…”

New footage. This time from a moving camera, evidently a drone. The picture was dreadful and kept lagging, but it showed boards flying over the valley through the smoke. Lots of jetboards. In a wedge, like before, ahead of Ghaurzakh. Now, though, no one was left to fly out to meet them.

Below, at the edge of the crater, something was moving — something red and scorched, crawling out of the smoke. A jet board dived down, a flash, and nothing moved anymore.

“…which points to a planned operation,” the presenter finished.

“Someone in command thinks exactly like you,” Adam said, shaking his head.

Only one dome? I’d hoped to use the portal a few more times, even if it meant losing millions of lives. I was ashamed of that. How was I, in a position like that, any different from the Federates, who ‘stayed above the fray’ and kept their hands off us?

Well, at least I made this destruction possible… All the others, if there were any… All the deaths and all the lives saved would be on my conscience, and that nearly made me bring those same eggs back up.

On the bright side, my hunger was gone.

A second explosion didn’t follow. I hadn’t killed anyone, but I hadn’t saved anyone either.

Novak and Kaluya arrived an hour later. Not by portal: a Bureau flyer landed on the pad by the entrance to the residence. They brought two electronic security specialists, who immediately set about checking the systems for malware.

We sat at the tea table in the small study. Only four armchairs were available, so Lina sat on Adam’s knee.

Kaluya was boring into me with his eyes again, so much that I felt uncomfortable.

“Have you got some kind of magic ants in your pants?” he asked. “How do you keep managing to get into messes like this, and, more interesting still, how do you keep getting out of them?”

I glanced at Novak, who hid a smile behind his teacup, and shrugged uncertainly.

“And you didn’t hand in genetic material for preservation?!” he said indignantly, catching me off guard.

“I think my luck is something more than just genes,” I answered.

“Just genes!” Kaluya grumbled.

“Please don’t clone me!” I asked him.

“That wouldn’t do us much good right now,” he said, clicking his tongue. “If I could, I’d pump you up to a Six or a Seven and send you out to hunt the enemy Eight. Unfortunately, we don’t have nearly enough time left even for that.”