Cool Darkness by Matthew Carpenter Chapter 5 : A Thorn in Paradise "So what the hell happened in there?" questioned Nemesis looking towards the front of the van in Nebulus' direction. "I was watching you more than I was watching myself" told a disgusted Nebulus, completely shamed by his performance or lack there of. "At least you know a sign when you see one. What happened to Jack?" "What do you mean, what happened to Jack" rudely snapped Nebulus who turned around to give Nemesis the evil eye. "We lost him before we got to the strike zone. Where'd he go? I thought he was supposed to follow us all the way out." "I don't know. Maybe he bumped into ICE or something. Why don't we get back there quickly and find out" Nebulus pointed out to Donna who pushed her foot into the floor, accelerating the van as she drove on into the city. Not soon enough for Nebulus' liking, the van pulled in front of the garage door of the warehouse. Nemesis calmly hopped out of the back door of the van and proceeded to open the door. The van came to a quiet stop with the garage door crashing down behind it. The lights were still on; the office door to the underground comps was still shut. "Jack! Hey Jack! Where the hell are you shit-head!?" yelled Nemesis, feeling a little funny about the whole situation. Walking to the back of the van, he picked up his rifle and proceeded to walk towards the office door. He was followed by Nebulus and eventually Slash, who had had enough of Jack's clowning around. Screwing around on the nets is one thing, but leaving a team in the thick of a job is another. They approached the office door and found it still locked from the inside. Nebulus walked over to a nearby desk, reached into the top drawer and picked up a magnetic key. He returned to the door and inserted the flat key into the slot just under the door handle which produced a soft pop as the lock disengaged. Nebulus opened the door and the group peered in. The office was still the same : a few file cabinets, a metal desk with a wooden, rocking office chair, a single light at the desk with another one in the ceiling, and a small hand comp sitting at the right of the desk. 'Nothing is missing. Everything is cool...except' thought Nebulus. "Jack's gone." "What!?" wined Nemesis in disbelief of wherever Nebulus had derived this idea. "The chair's here. He should be sitting in it down in the room" stated Nebulus loosing his cool. "Bullshit. He and I changed that last week 'cause he wanted a padded chair so his butt wouldn't hurt so much" slapped Nemesis. "Huh!?!?" "Come on" said Nemesis entering the room and pressing the correct sequence of keys on the hand comp to enable the elevator to the comp room. Slash moved the chair out of the way as the plate under the leg area of the desk slowly began its decent into the comp room. Within 10 seconds it had hit bottom, about 12 feet below in the concrete dungeon where Jack roamed. "Jack. Hey, Jack..you down there!?" yelled Slash. No answer. "He's probably still in the nets. He'll never respond like that" spoke Nebulus. "Well there's only one way to find out" said Nemesis as he hang dropped from the desk edge into the dark pit. "Don...hunnn....you moron" Slash sighed under her breath. 'He never thinks about traps.' "Watch out for traps." Nemesis never heard her voice; his concentration on where he was and not what people were doing topside. He pivoted left in the direction of the comp room. The corridor to the room was normal sized with a low ceiling. The walls were made of cold concrete that still flaked grit when rubbed against. It was dark with a few streaks of light coming from the room, barely lighting enough for someone to see. Nemesis changed his eyes to night vision to see that was up with Jack. 'All right Jack, where the hell are you man.' He peered into the comp room. The two main comps on the far wall were humming as usual, the short ceiling making them look larger than normal. He walked further into the room. The four workstations were still running with their monitors running lines of info across them constantly. 'Jack. Where the hell are you.' He lowered his rifle. In fact he lowered it until the barrel almost scraped the ground. He stood completely erect and walked over to the wall where the control panel was. A single touch and a second panel came up. He closed his eyes as he turned the ceiling light on. His eyes were switched back to normal vision and he opened his eyelids. "Come on down, guys!" yelled Nemesis as he looked over at Jack who was still slouched in his padded chair, still jacked into the nets. "What's the deal!?" yelled back Slash. "He's here. Still in the net." The elevator platform began to move back up and in no time the rest of the team minus Donna was in the comp room. "I guess he's still in the net." "What the hell's he still doin' in there?" replied Slash quite disgusted at Jack now that he was still here and had left them in Cryon. "He must've run into something." sighed Nebulus looking at his foot as it tapped lightly on the concrete floor. 'What could he have run into? ICE? Naw, couldn't be. He's too good for that. Then again... Naw, he must be screwin' around or somethin'. But why would he leave us in Cryon to go screw around somewhere? I wonder if they got this thing up and running before we got there. Or what if they had another site, or if we attacked the wrong site! Couldn't be. We planned this thing to perfectly to hit the wrong site. Yeah, sure.' he thought to himself, especially after how badly they fucked the whole deal up. 'Well, there's only one way to find out.' Looking up he said "I'm goin' in" and started to walk towards the workstation next to Jack's. "What! You can't be serious. Let's just pull the plug and get him back" screeched Slash. "Yeah, right. And possibly loose him forever. He might be into something serious, and there's only one way to find out." replied Nebulus, putting a wireless jack next to his ports. "I thought you could track someone like that for cryin' out loud!" "We'll see about that." With that he sat in the chair and jacked in, wireless of course. "Well, let's get them prepared for a long trip. I can't see them coming back any time soon" softly spoke Slash. She and Nemesis turned to the one cabinet that had little components and things in it. The door was opened and two IV's were taken out by Slash. She walked over to the two and began to get Jack ready for insertion. Nemesis in the mean time began preparing the two nutrient bags. In no time, both Jack and Nebulus were outfitted with medical nutrient bags that fed into their system. That way they at least wouldn't dehydrate. Nebulus stood up from a kneeling position on the asphalt street of an unknown city. It was dark, actually gray in color and the clouds in the sky were moving very fast. The surrounding buildings stood like monuments compared to Nebulus' small body. A little piece of newspaper skipped by along the ground behind his feet. The long street he was looking down seemed to go on forever. The city was completely deserted. "Strange" he told himself outloud. "Oh, well, let's get going." He began walking in the direction of the first gate to get into mainstream cyberspace. A few steps and he leaned forward to the ground and shape changed into a sleek black sports car, one of the new European cars that can top 300 mph. Fat tires, no rear view mirrors; kinda like an old Countach he thought to himself as he squealed his tires and flew down the streets. "Great. Traffic jam already." In the near distance he could see lots of people trying to get into the gateway. "Always a bunch of jerks who don't know there way around the block yet." With a glance skyward, he pulled off the ground and moved a story or two above the rest of the traffic. Flying over the crown was fun. The first gateway was breached easily and he soon got back onto the road and cruised into the highways, the internet highways that connected to everywhere in the world, and then some. After only a little time, his speed began to slow. Actually he began to slow immensely, eventually coming to a complete stop. 'What the hell is going on?' he thought to himself, checking all of his systems. Then he began to shape change back into a person, except he hadn't chosen to do so. 'Somebody's taking control of my environment.' Then he began to fly backwards, completely out of control. He fought to stabilize and he tried to stop, but eventually was thrown back into the crowd of people waiting at the gateway entrance. With an additional thrust, he was tossed into the crowd, landing on the hard asphalt just like everyone else had. "What the hell is going on!" he yelled at the top of his lungs as he stood up, wiping himself off. The area around he began to change and soon he was standing on a computer generated grid. No streets. No buildings. Just grids. He continued to look around, finally running his identifier program. In a few seconds an arrow appeared pointing in the direction off to his right, toward the gateway. He started to push his way in that direction, searching for Jack. The gateway soon became clearer to him as it was a large billboard sign which read : The Cyberspace Mob now rules the nets Pay to Enter. Pay at your OWN Risk "What the hell is going on, here!" he yelled. "Oh shut up up there you asshole!" came from someone behind him. He turned around to see who the hell was yelling at him in a crisis like this. "Fuck you buddy!" he yelled back, not knowing who had yelled at him. He continued to push his way towards the front. Eventually he got within a few hundred feet of the gateway and recognized Jack only a few steps in front of him. "Jack, what the hell is going on here man!?" asked Nebulus as he reached his companion. "What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were still in Cryon." "I was. We got back already. What the hell happened to you?" 'Take a look. One second I was in, the next I was pulled out by these guys. Do you believe this shit. They've taken over all the surrounding gateways and there's no way in or out to another gateway." "What do you mean. You can't even break it?" "No one can" explained Jack in a sorrowful tone of voice. "I've found a few friends here and they can't break it. Whoever made this isn't working for the government, military or a company. This is straight from the underground. All I can figure is that it's written in a new AI language that actually learns who you are and how to keep you from getting into the gateway if you haven't paid." "You mean to tell me that someone is holding the gateway hostage?" "Yep. The funny part is that no one has any idea who could've pulled a stunt like this off. This is beyond professional. I can't even tell where it's coming from." The two stood around almost as lost as everyone else. It was getting more crowded as time went on and eventually, Nebulus had had enough. "Get a site set up so we can start attacking this thing from the inside out." "Yeah right" replied Jack completely disgusted now. "Don't you think I've tried it already in about a thousand configurations, only to get tossed back without getting any further into the system. I told you once you moron, the more you do the more it understands about you, which means that it can stop you easier every time you try something new." "So how do we get the fuck through" blazed a beyond frustrated Nebulus. "So what should we do now?" asked Nemesis, peering towards the elevator. After standing there for ten minutes, his patience had run out and a bar run was the first thing that ran into his head. "I know. How about some Black Oil?" "That dump. Naw, I'm not in the mood" casually replied Slash. "How about Hot Kicks" she said with a sly grin growing on her face as she looked into Nemesis' eyes. "You gotta be kiddin' me. We don't fit into a place like that." "That doesn't keep you from screwin' every chic with big tits, long legs, and stockings pulled up to her crotch that works there now does it?" she kidded pulling him towards the elevator. "Jealous?" he asked with a smirk. "I'm coming in my pants just thinking about you" she joked as they stood on the elevator platform. She pressed her hand against the wall where a hidden panel was and the platform began to rise. Topside, they walked out of the office to find Donna sitting in one of the office chairs in front of a desk off to the side of the warehouse. "Everything OK with Jack?" "Who knows. Nebulus went into the matrix to fetch him" replied Slash. "Hey. We're gonna go to a bar. Wanna come?" "Sure. But first, where's my money?" she said getting back down to business. "Nebulus handles that and he is preoccupied right now." Donna wasn't too pleased about this. In fact she was getting quite pissed off as she stood up to face Slash. "Chill woman. It's not like we're gonna forget you. Jeez." "Hey. A job is a job. Now it's done and I want my money!" "Look honey, you ain't gonna get paid until he gets out of the nets so why don't you just pack that bitchy attitude of yours away and chill out until he is free. This job ain't done until we're all back and we got two in the nets!" snarled Slash, frowning her brow. Nemesis looked on at the 'cat fight' as he called it between the two. 'Wait a minute.' He looked at Donna's forehead. 'Zoom in. More. There. Now look at that. Sweat. And it's not even hot here, either.' He moved his gaze down to her hands. 'Same thing, and even a little twitchy.' He panned back up to her chest which was expanding and contracting a little faster and larger than he would've expected. He switched his eyes to IR, trying to get a thermal scan of her body. To no avail, the combat suit that she still wore blocked most of the signals coming from her body and canceled his experiment. "All right. Chill out. Why don't you take a shower and get changed and I will pull Nebulus out in time for him to pay you. Then we can go to the bars. OK?" stated Nemesis. "Where the hell am I gonna..." "There's a shower in the bathroom over there" he said pointing to a door along the office wall, "and your extra clothes that you brought are still in the van, right?" "Don't EVEN think about pullin' somethin' stupid, Nemesis" she warned with a glare. Nemesis didn't move and didn't loose eye contact until she turned around to get her stuff out of the van. Slash took his arm and turned him to fact her. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" she scowled in a low voice. "Trust me." By now, Jack and Nebulus had jumped in and out of cyberspace at least a dozen times, trying to trick the gateway or get past it somehow. Each time they would bring in different attack programs and loose them just as quickly as the 'Cyberspace Mob' would find them and erase them, or make them unusable. There were now about five people in a group around Jack and Nemesis; all of whom knew each other through one facet or another. "So where do we go from here?" sighed one of the guys. "We have to find another way around it. Everything we've tried has failed. Period. And I can't see any way around it" said Jack. "So the cybermaster Jack has finally met his match. How interesting" stated Nebulus, getting more excited at the prospect of what seemed like the ultimate challenge. "I wouldn't say that so soon. It's just going to take some time to figure out how to get around it" replied Jack, letting the comment fly over his head. "So where are we?" asked one of Jack's friends. "Simple. We can't get past without paying, which is completely absurd. We know it's not being done by the government, military, a company, Mogul, Nestroth and a few other groups. But that leaves a lot of names that, although I can't figure who could've masterminded this, could be responsible for it" stated Jack. Someone else spoke up. "Well, attack and defense programs don't work. It can tell who we are and seems to know our strengths and weaknesses. Camouflaging doesn't help since it kills that first. I don't think if we sent ICE against it it would even work." "What! Are you nuts. How the hell would you SEND ICE after it. There's nowhere to keep it connected to to run it" heckled another. "Yes there is and that's exactly what we're gonna do" spoke Jack, standing up and pacing around in a very small circle. "We can attach it to the gateway itself. It's identifier must still exist or we couldn't have gotten here." "Yeah, but it'll already know how to kill ICE." "Yeah, but I know a way to make it so they can't track it or disarm it" ecstatically spoke Jack. "Everyone jump out and meet me at my comp room in 1 hour." Donna came out of the bathroom wearing a short mini with tights underneath it, highlighting her legs with black spandex. Her wet hair left trickles of water on her leather short jacket that covered a tank top. 'Switch to IR. Focus and zoom on chest area. Just as I thought.' "You definitely look sexy tonight, woman" yelled Nemesis from across the warehouse. He hopped off the desk he was sitting on and approached her. "So where's Nebulus with my money, macho man?" she said with a smirk in her smile. "This way, my lady" he said, raising his left hand, palm up, to take hers as a rightful gentleman should. She placed her right hand in his with a flirtatious smile. He slowly started to turn around and Donna began to take a step forward to accompany him. Quickly, Nemesis spun back in her direction, landing a bone- breaking fist in her stomach. Instantaneously, she fell to the ground as if life had been sucked out of her. She laid on the ground in a fetal position, holding her stomach, completely unable to breath from the attack. Nemesis looking over to Slash who was sitting at a desk, giving her the signal. She rose from her chair carrying a needle. Nemesis reached down and gripped Donna's jacket firmly by the shoulders and ripped it down her arms so that they were bare from her shoulder to her elbow. She winced in pain, still unable to breath. Nemesis reached his hand up and received the needle from Slash. "Nighty night, my little spy" cooed Nemesis with a devil's grin, as he injected her with the tranquilizer. "Nighty night, bitch" spit Slash.