Cats Cradle Chapter 7

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Cally was trying to sleep.

Her body ached like all hell, cramps in her arms and back reminding her of a hard days work. Another two days and the truck would be ready. Teela could help now. She doubted how much the furball could help, but she could help.

At least Teela could sleep.

Fucking thing scared the crap out of her getting caught down in the restricted area. The madgirl zapped her with a taser, then she was dumped in the apartment.

Cally just wanted to get the hell up off Nehalennia.

Maybe she could find someone who’d sell them their shuttle. it wasn’t like she’d actually have to pay for it with the owner going to Azkhaban. Jack it, and call it a prize.

A buzzing, screeching noise erupted inside the apartment. She sleepily swatted at the alarm clock a few times, but the sound didn’t stop.

Her mind finally caught up with what the noise was.

“Shit!” She yelped, jumping upright. She scrambled for a light, knocking something heavy off the nightstand.

“Was ist das für ein Krach?” Teela slurred, slowly coming out from under the cloak of sleep. “Was soll die Aufregung?” Her hand went to her collar, which was still tightly locked around her neck.

The lights came up, painfully bright. Cally cursed under her breath. She looked down at the floor. The emergency alarm on the collar controller was active, little red lights flashing out along with the beat of the alarm.

Cally looked at Teela, pawing at the collar. There was no corresponding light. She grabbed the reader. Malfunction?

“I think it broke,” she said.

“Show me,” said Teela.

Cally tossed it to the catgirl, who caught it easily between her hands. Teela cancelled the alarm, before switching the machine into debug mode.

“Give me a second,” Teela said as she dived down into logfiles. “It was not my collar.”

Minutes passed. Cally was rubbing her hands together, staring at Teela as she worked.

“That is strange.” said the catgirl.

“What?”

“According to the logs the device received a single burst of data from an unknown wireless device.” Teela explained. “Contained a short message. “Trap 4 lab”. It had the correct transmission keys, which are hardware generated, and sent the alarm trigger code once without any failed attempt. The chance to do this is one in a trillion.”

Trap 4 lab. Sender was trapped in Quattro’s lab.

Teela directly looked at Cally. “It would be impossible to do. Not even an alpha could do it. Not with no knowledge of the receiving system. Not without any knowledge of the broadcasting system.The only person who otherwise knows the correct code is myself and Cortana. The collar logs show it as being constantly powered on and never opened. I can even see the glitch caused by Quattro zapping me.”

Cally thought. “Are you sure you just woke up here after Quattro zapped you? According to the tracker you spent an hour in the lab.”

“Yes!” said Teela, glaring at Cally. “I was unconscious. I cannot believe you’d suspect me. The only way anyone could get this code would be to spend days testing the chip, by asking me, or by getting it off Cortana, and I’m sure I didn’t tell anyone. And an hour wouldn’t be enough to rip it apart and test it. so that leaves....” she stopped. Dead. “Cortana...” she murmured. This was something that gave good Jedi bad feelings.

The hairs on Teelas body stood on end.”Then they’d get the codes. But then why send the alert code?”

“To see if there’s a response,” Cally said. “To see who moves quickly. Stir up the spies.”

Teela was fidgeting uncomfortably. The catgirl stared out the window at the starfield. She frowned. “I do not know....”

“Worried about Cortana?”

“Ja.”

Teela went quiet.

“I’m sure she’s alright,” Cally said, trying her best to sound reassuring.

“Not if she was hacked bad enough to give up this data,” Teela muttered. “I came up with her five years ago. And she made it through the whole thing just to get caught like this.”

A few tears moistened the fur on her cheeks.

Cally placed a soft hand on her shoulder. “We can’t afford to think about this now.” she said, keeping her voice gentle. “We have to focus on getting ourselves out of here in one piece.”

Teela could only nod.

“They know they’re being watched by Great Justice now. It won’t take ‘em long to figure out who we really are.”

“What do we do?” Teela asked her.

Ford thought for a second.

“They’re looking for a signal. We’re going to give them one. Plant the controller and collar in someone else’s quarters. By the time they figure out they’re not the spies, the strike force will be on it’s way in - it’s probably already on the way in of Cortana was hacked - and we’ll be on our way down to that lab to find the truth about that message.”

“Maybe Cortana wasn’t hacked?” There was a hopeful gleam in Teela’s eyes. “I mean, if they have Cortana, they know we are the spies.”

“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but if she hasn’t... then things just got a hell of a lot more complicated in ways that make my head hurt.”

Ford checked her own Beretta pistol, before handing Teela the Smith and Wesson-made PPK she kept concealed.

“Know how to use this?”

Teela nodded. “I’ve had Senshi training.”

“Good.” she smirked “That’s James Bond’s gun, just so you know.”

Teela was unamused. “As long as it shoots. Here is no place to fool around.”

“Sure. Let’s get going.”


Teela bristled with anxiety. There was no real way to tell if the transmitter she’d McGyvered up was broadcasting the proper signal, just that it broadcast something. A snap of blue smoke marked its passing. There was only so much she could do in the dim light.

Cats could see in the dark, but they couldn’t see in colour. She’d been stuffed into overalls which rustled as she moved. She preferred things which were a little quieter.

Her ears twitched with tension.

The controller was designed not to respond, not to give away it’s handlers position. She’d know if her signal was sent when the madgirl appeared. She’d know it was received when Ford appeared, or when Jet and friends stormed.

If the controller’s alarm wasn’t acknowledged and a proper shutdown keyed in, after five minutes it’d transmit the emergency signal.

“I just have to wait, then Jet will come rushing in and everything will work out”

Just have to wait. How long before Quattro and the guards come storming in? She swallowed her fear and set about finding some way out, just in case. She tried to calm down. It was sickeningly like waiting for the school principal to come back to the office, waiting to be punished.

Maybe Quattro’d left a pistol of some sort or something that could be hacked into a weapon. Batteries, capacitors, anything that might zap the bitch. She found a crate made of chromed steel that’d been left unlocked, or the lock had broken.

It opened easy enough, a light coming on inside to illuminate the contents. What a nice feature. Probably should’ve checked more of these, she noted, feeling just a little bit stupid. But she’d had to work fast.

The only thing inside were some strange plastic sheets, each wired up to what looked like a control box. She turned one on. The plastic rippled like a still lake that’d just had a stone thrown into it. Stiff, but still liquid at the same time. Turn it off, and it could be moulded by hand. Turn it on and it went rock solid.

Maybe she could make something with it. Yes, she could work with this. Maybe it might be possible to use the crate as cover. Knock the turret with something heavy thrown hard, then use this electric plastic to wedge the grille on the vent open.

Freedom was just a few minutes away.

Cathy, you are smart sometimes, aren’t you? She couldn’t help but congratulate herself.

She plucked a few more of the sheets... they might come in handy, before glancing around, looking for something heavy. Maybe if she just got her shoulder behind the crate and pushed?

Perfect!

She looked up.

And saw her own reflection in the steel. A little blurred, a little hidden by the splash of reflected light, but still unmistakeably wrong.

She opened her mouth. The reflection mimicked. She twitched her ears. The reflection mimicked. She brought her hand to the metal. The reflection reached out to her.

“No...” she whimpered. “That can’t be.”

The reflection looked confused. It looked distraught. Wild-eyed, it stared back at her, shaking it’s head in disbelief.

“No...” she whined. “That just can’t be me!”

A pair of boatlight eyes stared. It wasn’t her face. It wasn’t Cathy’s face reflected. It was... It was that blank. It was that catgirl. That catgirl that stood behind Quattro in the cafeteria.

It was Vivio.

She was Vivio.

But she was Cathy. Wasn’t she? How was that even possible? Some sort of re-modding? But the collar? Could it be this accurate?

She slumped to the ground, breathing rapidly. Her whole body charged up to run, but didn’t know where to. She knew in her heart it wasn’t a remod...

There was nothing left for her to do but scream and sob. They weren’t going to come for her, because in all likelihood, she wasn’t there.

The door opened. The lights came up, painfully bright. She looked up to see that four-eyed bitch standing over her, a faint look of amusement on her face.

“Oh, not again,” she said wistfully.

“What did you do to me?” Cathy whimpered.

“I copied you,” Quattro answered with a smug smile. “I copied your mind, saved the pattern, and downloaded it into the body of my catgirl while you were stunned. You’re just a copy, nothing more.”

Cathy gaped.

“Of course, I couldn’t fit all of you in the memory buffer, so I had to let a few parts just vanish, but the brain compensates for such things automatically,” Quattro giggled a little. I’ve been interrogating you here for the last day or so. Everytime you break or become uncontrollable, I just knock you unconscious and reload the pattern, then I compare the answers each copy gives.”

Cathy sat there, staring at her with tears streaming from her eyes. Her tail had gone stiff and straight, her ears rigid.

Quattro chuckled. “It’s not like you can stop me. It’s the right of the strong to do what they will with the weak.”

“You monster!” the catgirl screamed at her. She sprang forwards, a ball of hissing, razor-clawed fur making a beeline for Quattro’s face.

Quattro watched as the catgirl moved towards her in slow motion. ‘They always think they can do anything against me.’ she thought, amused.

Cathy go caught in mid-air, caught dead with a grip of iron around both her wrists holding her up on the air. Biomod? Cathy kicked out. Claws met Quattro’s cloak and skittered off the fabric, throwing sparks.

What the hell?

She looked at the helpless catgirl and smiled. “See.” she purred. “There is nothing you can do to stop me.“

Cathy looked at the floor, snarling.

“But now I will take care of your digital friend in my system. That is your box, isn’t it hmm?”

Cathy refused to answer.

“I’ll even let you watch while I kill it. Then, erase and rewind, you won’t even know it’s gone. You won’t even know it existed.”

Cathy swallowed. Cathy wanted to throw up all over that nice pristine blue bodysuit and silver cape.

“When I have the evidence for that idiot Senshi, I’ll let you watch yourself die,” she giggled. “Then make you forget you ever existed. And when I’m done, I’ll either find buyers for copies of your mind, or I’ll just erase the entire pattern and vanish you forever with the push of a button.”

Cathy tried to look defiant. Cathy tried to believe that the others would still come, bring Quattro to justice... Maybe in time to free her.

“Oh, you don’t believe me?” Quattro said a little bit surprised, “Maybe you will after your digital companion is gone. I’ll make sure you get a first class spectator seat.”

Cathy was stuffed back into the Cat’s cradle, screaming, bracing herself against the door before one irresistible shove threw her in. The door was jammed hard shut using some of that memory plastic. She wanted desperately to scream out. She wanted to yell and just hope that somehow Cortana would hear her.

But that’d play right into Quattro’s hand.

She bit her lip, while Quattro began to play with her holographic keyboard. There was something inhuman about how fast she worked.


The first hint Cortana had that something was wrong were the huge number of error messages coming back from her ‘forward probe’ into Quattro’s server.

‘Oh, this is bad.’

The small matrix she had set up to browse through the data on the computer was beginning to dissolve. Small semi-autonomous agents were running around randomly, dancing across the filesystem nuking folders as they went. They were searching for something.

Cortana directed her probes down into the underlying operating system, trying to figure out where they were coming from. It snapped back like an angry bulldog.

‘How did this system suddenly get that hostile... unless...’

The thought was interrupted. The environment began to collapse in on her, constricting down like a deflating ballon.

‘A virtual machine! How did I get caught in here?’

Cortana carefully began to draw back towards her communication link to the Stargazer. The attacks double back on themselves,coming in from everywhere at once, ripping away the defenses of her remotes on the system before closing in on the core.

There was no way she could stand against this.

Cut your losses and burn the bridges, that was what she’d been taught in the underspace. Get the hell out of Dodge and make sure nothing can follow.

Cortana sighed and sent SIGKILL to all parts still inside the lab’s computer. Her consciousness snapped back into the Stargazer. Close the link!. A few microseconds. The QED responded with an error.

A few packets of data followed through. She’d fallen into the trap.

Cortana cursed as they morphed into a small army of autonomous programs, swarming like hornets, separating the QED from her direct control and downloading more code. Forcing it into her.

Cortana’s avatar grimaced then flickered out of existence as she scraped the bottom of the barrel looking for any spare cycle, trying to hold back the swarming attacks coming out of the data connection. The enemy had to be a mid-alpha, maybe more, well out of her league. She began to realise that she might actually lose this fight.

Even handicapped by the narrow bandwidth the attacker continued to push forward, battering aside and bypassing Cortanas firewalls faster than she could set them up. It was a desperate attempt, a rearguard action stalling for microseconds while the rest of her set up better defenses further in.

The attacker closed in on the central router of the Stargazer. Cortana could see where it was going.

It wants to access my sensor systems. It wants the radio.

If the attacker reached her CPU and the SDR, the game would be over instantly. If she was lucky, digital oblivion. If not, she’d seen some of the virtual zombies left by Boskone attacks.

Just a few cycles, just a few cycles.

An idea sparked. A stupid, crazy idea but it had as much chance as anything. There was one way to cut the connection. Hopefully the metal framing of the Nova would provide the shielding. Cortana was no hacker, but she knew her radio better than anyone.

She held the flood back for another moment, before slowly cutting back on her defenses.She tried to make it seem like a genuine collapse, and not just feint. She cloistered herself within her core. Duck and Cover.

It was just what the attacker wanted. They lunged forward, grabbing control of the radar system. Cortana tweaked it ever so slightly, hoping it’d remain beneath notice.

The radios of the Stargazer came to life just long enough to send a strong, focused microwave signal into the interior of the Stargazer itself... concentrated upon the loop of Ethernet cable that belonged to the improvised connection between the QED box and the router in front. The cable was shielded. It wasn’t shielded that well.

An induced electrical pulse shot along the cable, zapping the QED’s network port, and the port on the router simultaneously. A small trickle of blue smoke fingered its way out of the router. The activity light on the QED was still blinking. But nothing except the PoE raw voltage was coming through the cable anymore.

Waiting on a network signal that could never come, the attackers began to spinlock, doing nothing but waiting for an input while swallowing up cycles. Cortana killed them, before locking herself down entirely from her network and the Nova, enforcing a complete shutdown in case any traces remained active.

“Phh... that was close...”


“And that is that,” said Quattro, turning back towards the trapped catgirl. Her face was twisted into a mockery of concern. “Oh, I’m afraid to say it killed itself rather than give up. I can ping the device on the other end, but nothing beyond it responds.”

“It was disconnected,” Cathy stated.

“Not likely,” Quattro smiled. “I sent the command to it to trigger your AI’s sensor and radar systems. There’s nothing on my sensors yet. So, it appears she burned herself out rather than give her position away,”

“No...” Cathy whimpered. “I don’t believe you!”

“It was only a beta. It wasn’t like she was worth anything anyway,” Quattro said. Her voice was a parody of condolence. “That little device of yours in the server. I might have to keep it. Hardware access at interwave lag, while undetectable by regular means. It might be worth something if you tell me how it works.”

“You’ll be not intelligent enough to understand it” Cathy answered. “It was built by some expert.”

Quattro sneered at her. “You will be surprised,” she said.

She crossed the floor to the server door, then opened it. The black box sat still transmitting data from the server that would never be received. The signal died immediately. The transmission light went dark.

Quattro looked annoyed at the box. Had some timeout dropped the connection? Or maybe some kind of self destruct?

She opened the lid. Her eyes narrowed into a vicious glare.

“Empty!” she spat.

“Seems you ruined it,” Cathy smirked. “Told you so...”

A small victory was still a victory.

“Well, we see how much it matters to you when you get to feel your mind being slowly erased.”

“You will remember it for me,” Cathy said bitterly, “you failed, and no second attempt this time.”

“And I will have the pleasure of making you sing Daisy as you go.” Quattro returned to her keyboard, and began to play a new tune of data.

Cathy’s blood went cold as the machine around her began to come to life. When would it happen? Would she even be able to recognize it?

An alarm pealed out from Quattro’s console, a new window popping up in front of the madgirl, flashing with data.

“Signal,” she said, before getting to work. “I guess, you’ll have to wait. But you’re not going anywhere, are you?”

Cathy smirked. Cortana! It was about the right time, give or take. If Cortana was sending a radar pulse, like Quattro said she’d made her do, maybe she was just cut off from the QED? Maybe Jet and comrades were on their way already.

Quattro keyed up a comm-window, opening a direct line for Sato’s office.

“Oh Sato-chan,” she said in an almost sing-song voice that was entirely too pleased with itself, “I think I have your proof,”

“You do?”

Sato sounded just a little bit annoyed.

“Mmmm-hmmm.” Quattro nodded. She smirked like a cat who’d gotten an especially large amount of cream. “The catgirl here sent a distress signal, and I have a response coming from within the station, broadcasting at high power. They’re calling for help.”

It wasn’tt from Cally Auron’s quarters, but it wasn’t from very far away either. They would hardly be dumb enough to trigger it from their own apartment.

“Do you have the point of origin for the signal?” Sato impatiently demanded.

“Within thirty meters of Cally Auron’s quarters.”