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  Molly tapped his back, signaling her surrender.

  It was a familiar feeling to her. They’d often trained in the base gym in hand-to-hand combat. Since they’d both had extensive prior training in martial arts, their normal style would often lapse back in to some bastardized version of the ancient human arts of Jujitsu or Karate.

  Many times other squad members would gather to watch them train and to speculate on who would have their ass handed to them. It was never a foregone conclusion, despite her slight frame and geeky awkwardness.

  “Sorry!” he said, realizing that his enthusiasm had gotten the better of him. “I forget how delicate you girlies are.”

  Molly suspected there was something loaded in that statement, along the lines of him not having much contact with women these days. She didn’t have the inclination to ask, though.

  Joel’s psychodramas with women were his own.

  “There’s something different about you though…” He held her out by the shoulders, looking her up and down again.

  “I’ve lost weight?” She looked hopefully up at him.

  He shook his head. “Something else.” He paused and looked at her face. “Didn’t you used to be a brunette?”

  Molly’s cheeks slowly revealed her embarrassment. “Yeah. One of my genetic experiments is taking longer to wear off than I had anticipated.”

  Joel howled with laughter while pointing at her hair. “How much longer?” he asked catching his breath.

  “Two years, three months and nineteen days. It was meant to self-correct in three months, but, well...”

  “You miscalculated?”

  “No, tequila,” she admitted.

  “You were drinking?”

  “No, I used tequila as the carrier fluid.” She eyed her friend in annoyance, “I was impatient and it was handy.”

  Joel was still snickering, and shook his head at her. “Same ol’ Molly, I see.” She rolled her eyes…both at herself and the familiarity Joel had with her sagas.

  She pushed a chair out for him, and sat herself down.

  “Anyway, good to see you, fuckwit. I ordered you a beer.” The waitress arrived with their drinks, and Molly was quick to get her lips around hers. “You still drink this stuff, right?””

  “’Of course, and thank you. So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” he asked.

  She played with her bottle before looking at him, “I’ve left the military, and I need a job.”

  She didn’t say more, and allowed Joel to absorb it. He lowered his eyes to his bottle.

  “A job, you say? Genius-girl Molly Bates has come to me for a job?” He looked back up at her, clearly amused at the irony. “You know, all the time you were assigned to our detail, there never once was a problem that you couldn’t solve. The boys would swear you were a witch, or a freak, or something. I just told them you were an evil genius. They called you ‘devil-woman’ behind your back, did you know that?”

  “I knew,” she smiled, completely uninterested in what some meatheads thought of her.

  Joel continued, “And yet you’d keep going back to the research core.” He asked her a question that he had wondered from time to time, “Why did you never join an ops team?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno. Guess I just felt more comfortable not having to make life and death decisions all the time.” She looked around before returning to her beer, “I’ve made a few mistakes in my life already. I found out that sometimes I act before I think, and sometimes even when I think, I don’t always think like normal people.”

  Because I’m Broken.

  Joel waited a moment before asking. “And that’s why you want a job now? So you don’t have to put all that talent to good use?” Joel took a sip of his beer. Man, it tasted good no matter what time of day it was.

  Her grin spread across her face, looking a little mischievous. “Oh, no, I’m happy to put my immense reservoirs of talent to good use. I just want you to help direct it for me at the moment!”

  Joel’s squaddies often found her arrogant, but Joel knew better. He understood her weird humor, even though he didn’t get it half the time. He put it down to the whacked-out ancient shows she would watch. Fokk knows where she got those datastreams from, though. One of the engineers had once told him they were from a time long forgotten in the Sark System.

  “So, a job, for your talents…that pays beer-money,” he pointed to the drink that she’d already almost drained. He rubbed his chin, pretending to think deeply.

  What he couldn’t do with her talents!

  “And it has to be, uh, legal,” she added, remembering that at some point she also needed to find a way of reprogramming Oz to make sure she wouldn’t be too restricted by his newfound morality.

  Joel’s eyes opened wide. “Legal? What do you think I am? I’m an upstanding Sarkian, I’ll have you know!” His mock indignation made them both giggle.

  Molly knew he was mostly straight-laced when it came to the jobs he would take. But there was no denying that the circumstances under which he had left the service had left a few people wondering.

  Joel pursed his lips. “I have some ideas. A friend came to me the other day about something he noticed that was going down in his company: price-fixing on a type of painkiller that thousands of Oggs and Estarians need. Said there were whispers of hiking the prices to three times their market value, just because they can. He wanted a way to stop it without involving official channels or losing his job.”

  He continued, waving off the waitress asking him if he wanted another beer. “I didn’t know how to fix it; I don't have the tech skills to tackle something like that. And taking on a big corporation? Who’s going to listen to me? Not the police, that’s for sure. But now,” he glanced at her, “now you’re here. And I wonder if we can’t take this job and do some good things for these folks?”

  Molly used her sultry voice, and her eyes glinted with glee. “Sounds like my cup of tea. Tell me, will there be hacking?”

  Joel had worked with her long enough to know that hacking turned her on. Shit, she is one weird chick…. “Oh, there will be hacking, baby. There will be lots and lots of hacking.”

  As he smiled, his awareness seemed to drift off. When he refocused, he dropped his eyes to his beer. “You know, I never did apologize for the thing with Candy.”

  Molly did a double take, trying to work out what he was talking about.

  He lifted up his bottle to point at her, “You remember. The girl you said had several guys in the squad in tow.” He took a sip. Molly nodded, recalling the bust-up. “I just wanted to say, I appreciated you looking out for me. I mean, I know it was a big thing then and we didn’t exactly part as close as we had been. But. I’m sorry I was a jackass about it.”

  Had Molly been drinking at that exact moment she may have choked. “Well, er, that’s great. I mean, yes, I was. I just didn’t want her to make a fool out of you.” She hesitated. “While we’re on the subject. I have something to apologize for too.” She noticed that Joel had looked up.

  “You remember that club we went to not long after that?”

  “Yeah, the gay bar where you got called away for some lab crisis?” Joel recollected the night.

  Molly looked at him, hoping that she wouldn’t have to say it.

  “There was no crisis, was there?” Joel figured out. “And you knew it was a gay bar?”

  Molly kept her face straight. “And I paid Hose, my friend on the door, to encourage the guys to, erm, keep you company.”

  Joel’s face dropped.

  “You mean…”

  “Yeah. They didn’t find you that magnetic. They were having you on.”

  He closed his eyes in a grimace. “You are a cold-hearted bitch!” He groaned.

  “Now, now, you just tried to make good about Crystal.”

  “Candy.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I genuinely tried to get out of there without letting anyone feel rejected. I fretted about that for days! I even wondered
if…” He stopped himself, realizing there was some information he didn’t want to share with Molly.

  They looked at each other, and couldn’t help but chuckle.

  Joel finally admitted. “One of them told me I should go into modeling.”

  “Yeah, model airplanes maybe!” Molly retorted.

  The two laughed. Just like they had done back in the day, before Candy had gotten between them.

  He drained his glass, dropped some credits onto the table for the drinks, and stood up.

  “Lemme talk to my contact and see what we can set up in terms of this job. I’d say ‘stay sober,’ but stay by your phone, at least. I’ll get back to you soon.”

  And with that he headed out of the bar.

  Molly watched his broad shoulders and buff arms leave through the front door, then signaled to the waitress for another beer. The drink was helping her process the enormity of the day, she told herself.

  And the residual shit from having to deal with being ushered out of the service due to a 4077.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Damn it,” Molly hissed. “The whole point of getting this close, Joel, was so that I didn’t have to try and hack through the XtraNET and deal with their port security!”

  Molly was not happy. Not only was the signal not strong enough from the roof of the next building, but now Joel was trying to tell her that he couldn’t get into the server she needed.

  Meatheads and technical considerations just do not mix.

  She pushed the car into hover and came to rest just above the building. She hated being this exposed, but there was no other way. The underground parking lot was heavily controlled and she didn’t like their chances of getting out of there if Meathead tripped any of the security protocols.

  “There has to be a server that has that label on it. It’s there somewhere.” Agitation was starting to show in her voice. She needed Joel to find this server or else it was game over.

  “Well, if there is, I can’t find it.” There was a hint of irritation in his voice too. It had been a while since he had really had to perform. He was already impressive to his general clientele on his normal security and PI jobs.

  Molly glanced furtively out across the city. Sure, the anti-radar paint gave them some cover from official channels, but all it would take is for someone in one of the nearby buildings to notice them out the window and report a suspicious looking vehicle, and they were screwed. This wasn’t going how they had planned it, when they had eventually gotten the ‘go’ for this project.

  She scrambled to pull her kit bag into the passenger seat, and located her handheld holo. Since the capacity was all used up on her wristband, she’d had to go retro.

  “Hang on…” It was Joel again, over the comm system. “There’s a secondary server room.”

  Joel had made out that this was going to be a walk in the park. He figured that because his contact–their first client–worked for the company they were breaking into, it would go smoothly. He even had the guy’s security pass. But Molly was skeptical.

  There was no way that Joel’s movement into the building—through the front door and straight to the server room—was going to go down as “normal” behavior. Some keycard protocol was going to pick it up, and she didn’t buy that this Mac Kerr would walk that route “all the frickin’ time”. It just didn’t stack.

  Nevertheless, Joel had been able to walk in there with his gear and everything, and nothing had been flagged.

  Yet.

  Molly heard him grunting on the line, like he was trying to shift something out of the way.

  “Okay, I’ve got it. Inserting the peg now….”

  Moments later, the holo screen activated and started flashing as it located the peg and established contact.

  “We’re in!” she announced, and got to work.

  Joel silently mouthed “thank you” to the air above him. The last thing he wanted was to have lost face on his first job with this bright young thing. Since meeting with her in the bar the other day, the idea of having a partner in crime kind of gave him a renewed sense of purpose. He just needed to not mess it up this time.

  Molly had already moved on to phase two of the game plan. Anyone sitting in the car would have noticed her mood change. When she hacked, there was an intensity of purpose—like her mind had left her body and the fingers on her keyboard were being controlled by a remote force.

  “There’s a problem,” she said after a few moments.

  Joel had been slouching against the stack, and now he straightened up.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like someone knew we were coming. There is new code, different construction, like a shell around the original code that runs their pricing model.”

  There was a silence.

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Not in the time we have. Lemme see if Oz has any better luck….”

  “Oz?”

  Aggghh, shit! She hadn’t told him.

  “Yeah, the AI that is plugged into my wrist holo and neural cortex.”

  “What the fuck?!” Joel hissed. “AI exists? And you have one wired into you?!” He realized he was raising his voice and mentally calmed himself while clenching his teeth in frustration at Molly.

  The girl really had no clue what it was to function on a team.

  “Why did you think I had to leave the military so fast?”

  “I heard it was the result of some questionable sexcapades, resulting in a 4077 condition.”

  “That was the cover to get out. I never did it with an Estarian, let alone in his…you know. Gross!”

  He closed his eyes for a half-second. “But you have a fucking AI in your brain. When were you going to share this with the rest of the team?” His irritation was slowly being replaced by curiosity.

  “His name is Oz, and he jumped into my holo through the Ethertrak while I was sleeping. I woke up and realized I had two choices: turn him over and potentially give the military the goddamn singularity they will use to destroy the local galaxy—thus becoming the criminal that downloaded him onto my hacked holo—or run. We chose run.”

  “’We? You’re talking like it’s a person.”

  “Well, technically, he is. He has an awareness, and a personality that he’s developing, just like any entity.”

  Molly, if I may interrupt, I’m in. And from my calculations, with your level of skill and the interface you’re using it would have taken 2,453 hours to crack through that shell.

  “Thank you, Oz. I appreciate your help,” Molly responded out loud, partly for Joel’s benefit.

  “You’re talking to him?” He couldn’t believe what was going on as he licked his lips. And right in the middle of an intense goddamn mission.

  “Yes, just thanking him for saving me two-and-a-half-thousand hours of work.” She tapped a few keys on the holo, checking they were in the clear and still undetected.

  “Okay, Oz. Let’s get that patch in, and then we can pull Joel out.”

  Roger that, milady.

  “Oz is downloading the patch that you wrote?”