Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

countered, "It's not government. It doesn't follow State netsec theory."
"Who else could produce this?" She asked.
"Zeta?" Firenze hazarded. "Or another of the champion corporations."
"Effectively still State actors, but perhaps even less ethically constrained due to their relatively precarious positions."
"Do you want to stop?" He asked. His torch hovered just over the surface.
"Well..." she trailed off. She snapped a surgical mask over her face and said, "We're just taking peek."
Firenze nodded and pressed the torch home. The cutting flame arced and sputtered across the liquid lattice, flaring between gaps in the fluid. A spark burst from deep within, lashed across his flared gloves with a lightning-crack.
"Counter-hack." Firenze stated, reflexively.
Lauren reported, "Bastion three-point-one-point-two. Standard corporate security suite, activated by a grade three limited AI from a remote site." She blinked. "Link cut, feedback loop engaged. The Bastion is neutralized."
Firenze doused the torch and said, "Corporate security. Can we trace?"
"Altess City. Zeta EnProCo North African and Mediterranean regional headquarters." She confirmed.
"Mother-loving Zeta." Firenze echoed. Of all the State-backed champion corporations, it was undoubtedly the most powerful. The Zeta Energy Processing Corporation sat atop every dimension of the energy business, from mining through refining, transmission all the way to the batteries on the shelf. It built engines and widgets, it sold 'managerial paradigms', and it was welded to the Authority's teat.
Lauren's scalpel had vanished, and she wrung her hands. Another tic. She advised, "Altess is the control station for the Arclight Bore. There is a high probability that this data is related to strand harvesting."
The bottom of his stomach felt like it had fallen out. Arclight was Zeta's big damned hole-in-the-sky. It was the largest terrestrial bore, a testament to engineering and ingenuity, and an extinction event waiting to happen. Ice-water adrenaline thundered in his veins, and he repeated the name, "Arclight."
The cube hung before him, its edges peeled back from his probes, the light catching and twisting on its silver planes. Whatever this secret was, it came from the borehole, the negative-mass tear in reality, where the Authority ripped out the insulation-lining of the universe. Zeta's source of power. The spookiest place on earth. Any secrets there would be worth killing for. His fingers tingled, every nerve alight with the competing urges to tear this box open or run screaming.
Lauren stood silent. She watched him watch the box.
He began to spin theories, work out nervous energy through conjecture, "Okay, so this is, what? Ops data from the bore? Secret projects? Maybe it's safety violations. What if Arclight isn't as stable as they say? What if the Greens are right?"
She replied, "Any aberration at the bore would send the Authority into seek-and-destroy mode, and even Zeta can't risk that kind of exposure. The relationship is symbiotic, but not equal. The probability of lethal countermeasures has increased."
"Do we proceed?" He asked. The question echoed through the room.
"That is your decision." She deferred. Her words were ambivalent, but her hungry gaze fixed upon the cracked cube.
He already knew his answer. "Let's do it."
Firenze stepped up to the box, once more, raised one of his hands, hovered just above the crack his torch had carved. He moved his fingers like a puppeteer with invisible strings. Preset cracking configurations executed, and a chunk of the lattice fell away. Another blast-arc of white heat lashed over his gloves with a rising chime. Lauren sealed the breach, isolated the counter-hack. Firenze twisted his hands, spun the cube, and carved away the next layer of defenses.
Kendrix's toys were working wonders. The spiders wormed through the gridwork, illuminated every flaw and weakness. The crackers, torches, and jaws ripped into every exposure. Firenze spun the cube, like wet clay on a lathe, bathed the drain-slit floor with raining silver. With every turn, the chiming grew towards a deafening crescendo.
What remained was a sphere of liquid light, a perfect radiance that overwhelmed the fullbright of the room. It washed over him in waves, sought every corner and cranny, but the seals held. He stepped forward, raised a probe, and the sphere detonated.
It blew out like a balloon, expanded to five times its size, forced Firenze to scramble back. The light faded, the chime dwindled, and the globe loomed over them, near-translucent and swelled with pulsing light.
"What are you?" He asked in wonder.
Lauren stood beside him again. "This is an unknown artifact. I have no data." Concern dominated her voice.
"We're secure, right?" He asked. He already knew the answer, but nerves made him ask.
"Yes. Security seals are holding, and we're rotating servers and rolling crypto. I am adapting some of this blackbox's own security protocols, as they were quite proficient. It would take weeks to track us, and weeks more to crack this room."
"I did it in one." He argued.
"You are the best." She replied. "But this file is curious. It has no handles, and it does not respond to passive probes." She executed an automated diagnostic, ran data over a parser, then frowned. "No response."
The sphere hung, boiling.
Firenze carved a hole in the air, conjured a raw feed, and split his view between render and code. He talked himself through it, "Looks like all there is, is this. No handles, no prompts, no interface. This data is dead weight, so why build it? Why lock it so tight?" He glanced up at the churning ball. There was no purpose to this artifact, it existed but did not interact. Nothing about it made sense.
He stepped closer, raised his hand to run an active probe, a quick brush from the Jaws of Strife. His code-window cut-out flickered, a burst of data flashing across the link. "Hold." He said.
Lauren parsed the output. "It reacted to the probe. No transmission, just a handshake. I'm going to inject a query." She summoned a key, fed it into the sphere. Nothing. She frowned and reported, "No response."
Firenze pulled out another junk data key and tapped it against the surface.
The entire body rippled, spines blooming over its surface, then settled.
"It likes me, but not you." Firenze stated. "Why?" A tingle