Walter stooped to inspect the bag. He wiggled its white plastic mouth open and peered inside. It looked to be normal trash: rotting fruit rinds, balls of paper, a tin can. Walter picked the bag up to look under it, but it was caught on something. He moved some of the neighboring trash out of the way and saw that the bag had been tied down to an iron rod poking out of the pavement. Someone didn’t want the bag moved, even in the floods.
Walter peeked back inside at the garbage. He considered running to his apartment for gloves so he could sift through the foulness, then noticed something odd about the mouth of the bag. There were two layers. A bag within a bag!
Walter’s heart raced with the series of discoveries. He knew, as surely as stumbling across a wallet in the market, that he was about to uncover treasures. He glanced over his shoulder at the mouth of the alley and began digging between the two plastic liners.
At the very bottom, behind the cool dampness of the mucky filth sitting inside the inner bag, he felt a cloth bundle. Walter pulled it out to see what he had lucked upon.
Clothes. A stupid Navy uniform, but the pockets felt heavy. Walter reached in one and came out with a radio. He felt the urge to twist the power on, but radios were poison, too easily traceable. And besides, they were worthless unless you had friends with the same models. He chucked the thing over the wall at the end of the alley, taking delight in the sound of its splintering demise on the other side.
In another pocket, Walter found a neat surprise: A gun. Navy issue. He figured it would fetch at least what he should’ve won at Rats. He slipped the thing into his waistband and rummaged through the rest of the pockets.
Nothing. There was a row of medals above the breast of the jacket, so he took those, just in case any of his friends would be dumb enough to trade for them. He then flicked the useless jacket over another heap of garbage.
Walter patted the pants down next and felt a single item. At first he thought it was a credit chip, and his mood again waxed. When he saw it was a Navy ID badge, his stomach sank and swelled at once. He’d seen them before, mostly from wallets lifted off soldiers on training furlough. They were like lottery stubs, always with the allure of high-ranking passcodes and first-class tickets off Palan, but usually coming up as worthless as the plastic they were printed on. Part of Walter knew that he would access the chip and find useless codes he could just hack in his sleep if he wanted. But another part, the hopeful gambler inside, imagined the man was an Admiral with codes that could summon havoc-wreaking forces with a single dispatch, or admit him to a distant university on some foreign aid GI bill.
Walter clutched the plastic chip, which may or may not contain his dreams, and tossed the black pants as far from him as he could. He thought about rushing to his mother and telling her about the curious man in the alley, but he needed to get to a computer first. There was no point exciting her weakened heart only to let it down when nothing came of the find.
Walter slipped the chip into his favorite pocket, the small one with the silent zipper that he greased daily. He trotted down the alley and considered which computer to use: the one at the library kiosk, or the one at Hommul HQ? And should he try and pawn off the gun immediately, or spread some seeds amongst his friends to drum up the price? Or should he just keep it?
Walter was so distracted by the decisions as he slipped past his apartment door that he didn’t notice it opening. Nor did he note the three large Palans sliding out into the night after him.
••••
“Walter? That you, boy?”
Walter’s heart skipped a beat. He slid to a stop in the alley. He looked for the deepest shadow to dive into, when a powerful, meaty hand slapped down on his collarbone, fixing him in place.
“Aren’t you out a little early to be on a proper raid?”
Walter turned and met the squinty gaze of his uncle, then saw the old man was escorted by two of his large goons.
“And aren’t you a little early to come pay your respects?” Walter asked. He nodded toward his apartment door. “She’s not dead yet, you know.”
His uncle laughed and slapped his back. “Not yet, you are quite right. Doing a fine job of tending to her, I see.”
Walter shrugged. “Some other clan leaders pitched in equipment,” he said.
His uncle wagged a finger at him, and the two brutes to either side shifted their bulk as if eager to put some of it to use. “Careful,” he said. “You know I’d do more if the clan wasn’t hurting like it is.”
The clan wouldn’t be hurting if you did more, Walter thought.
“What’s this?” his uncle asked. One of his fat hands darted toward Walter’s belly and came away with the pistol.
Walter flinched, but it was too late.
“Hey—”
“Very nice,” his uncle said, turning the gun around in his hand to inspect it. One of the brutes stepped closer to get a good look. Walter’s uncle beamed. “Excellent find. I’ll add it to the clan coffers.”
“But that’s—”
“You’ll get your share, of course.” He sniffed the air. “Was there something else you wanted to tell me about?”
Walter shook his head and thought of mintberry shakes and shiny new laptops.
His uncle smiled. “Don’t overdo the pleasantries, Nephew. I’m liable to think you’re plotting my demise.” He handed the gun to one of his goons, his eyes never leaving Walter’s. “Now tell me, Junior Pirate, since you obviously think I’m performing below the watermark—If you were running Hommul clan, what would you do differently?”One of the goons chuckled. The other looked over the gun before stuffing it into the shadows of his jacket.
“I’d invest in ships,” Walter blurted out. His thoughts on the matter were no secret. He watched the gun—his treasure—disappear.
“You’d sink us with a fleet of ships, would you?” His uncle laughed. “No clan has ever prospered by wasting their spoils on ships.”
“No clan has ever led without them,” Walter said. He looked back to his uncle.
His uncle laughed even harder, his throaty bellow filling the alley and flooding out beyond.
“You think this is about leading?” He pointed out the alley. “Do you think the Smiths own their ships? They don’t. Terran banks own their ships and they own the Smiths with their interest payments. What do the Smiths get in return? The headache of managing this flooding place and the thrill of first recruits, that’s what. You think this is about who’s in charge? Boy, you have no idea. This is about who can pay the rent, who can raid enough to get by. Scrap and salvage, boy, that’s what’ll see us through the rains, not your blasted pirate ships.”
Walter clenched his jaw lest his mouth get him in trouble. His uncle stepped to the side and waved at his apartment’s flood-high stoop.
“Now get along. Go see to my sister in case it’s the last chance you get.”
Walter was glad to. He squeezed past his uncle and between the two towers of goon.
“And no more talk of ships,” his uncle called out after him. “Nobody ever made a dime on the blasted things. They’re just holes in space that suck your money away.”
More laughter filled the alley. It chased Walter up the steps and mocked him for being stupid while he fumbled uncharacteristically with the locks. He hurried with them as fast as he could and took longer as a result. After working the last lock loose, he slipped inside with his mom and the machines, slamming the door shut to block out the awful and humiliating stench in the alley.
35 · The Raid · Two Days Later
Walter concentrated on the locked comm box attached to the back of the Navy building. With another deft tickle from his lockpick, he felt the final tumbler click into place, his torque wrench slide to the side, and then the Human-built Master lock popped open smoothly.
“Who’s the masster now?” Walter hissed. He smiled over at the moderators and pushed the lid closed with a soft click. One of the mods ticked an item off on his clipboard while Pewder switched places with Walter and took his turn at the supposedly impregnable lock. Each kid had two minutes to get the hatch open. Walter had taken less than thirty seconds. He glanced up at the dark and roiling sky and hissed with impatience as Pewder struggled with the mechanism.
After what felt like an hour, the lid to the comm box popped open, and Pewder pumped his fist and turned to beam at Walter. Walter pushed Donal forward, wishing they could just skip to the good part.
It took Donal almost the full two minutes. It felt like longer, but Walter watched as one of the moderators counted down the final seconds with his hands. It was all Walter could do to not reach forward and finish the job himself.
Finally, with seconds to spare, the lock clicked open. Donal started to push it closed again, but one of the moderators caught the boy’s wrist and waved Walter forward.
Walter sneered. Finally. He pulled out his small pouch of electrical gear and freed his alligator clips. First, he placed a button LED inside the comm box and tapped it on. The small lamp put out just enough light to reveal the interior of the box, but not enough to spill past and alert anyone to their presence.
The alligator clips from his card reader were then attached to a set of wires—red to red and black to black. Walter liked to think of the reader as a second type of lockpick, one that slid dexterous programs into the tumblers of electronic firewalls, jiggling them loose. For this final test, each trainee would use their reader to load a hack they’d been working on for weeks. Or, as in Walter’s case, for the last two days.
In one of Walter’s pockets, he had a card with his actual assignment on it, just in case anyone checked. With one swipe, it would bypass four layers of firewall and two security checks before routing a message through the large Navy containment tower a few blocks away. That tower was full of entangled particles whizzing around inside fibermagnetic wires. Those wires were connected to a Bell Phone, which could send the message instantly to Earth, millions of light years away, where the sister entangled particles would accept the transmission. The transmitted code would then seek out and hack a certain mainframe, taking down the Galactic Union homepage and displaying that year’s pwned message for his moderators to validate.
Walter had written the program just that morning, and he knew it would work. But he wouldn’t be using the backup card that held his pristine hack. No, he would be using the one he had written earlier, the one saved on the Navy ID badge pulled from the alley two nights prior, the one that promised to solve Hommul clan’s ship deficiency by making sure no clan had ships.
Walter sneered in the pale light emanating from the comm box. He reached into his favorite pocket and pulled out the card. He held it up to the reader fastened with its alligator clips and prepared to swipe it—
•• TWO DAYS BEFORE ••
Walter hurried down the alley steps to the basement entrance of Hommul HQ. His family’s pirate offices were drastically below flood level, yet another embarrassing result of his uncle’s maniacal drive to cut costs. He pulled out his pick set and knelt down before one of the dozens of locks on the door. If a non-member picked the wrong one—or even threw the tumblers too far in the correct lock—alarms would sound and deadbolts would engage. In order to enter the headquarters, clan members simply had to pick the correct lock and do so gently. There were few things more humiliating than setting off alarms on one’s own door.
Walter clicked the mechanism aside with practiced ease. As with most skilled pirates, fumbling for a key on a crowded ring would’ve taken him longer. It was much slicker in any case to simply carry a single key for every lock, which is how he thought of his pick set.
Pulling open the door, Walter was greeted with a billowing rush of warm air, a sign that the air conditioner was on the fritz again. He stepped inside and yanked the door shut behind him. The thrum of water pumps vibrated through the walls as he hurried through twisting corridors. It was good to hear the pumps running with the rains looming in a day or two. Hommul HQ had been flooded out twice in the nine years they’d been in the new space. Walter frowned at the thought as he snuck past the Junior Pirate bunkroom. The lights inside were off, the darkness bearing an unoccupied stillness. Walter knew where most of the Junior Pirates-in-Training were—he’d just left them around the Rats pit. The Senior Pirates were probably out staking heists and prepping for the upcoming finals. Whatever the reason, Walter felt giddy to have the place to himself.
His mood sank, however, when he entered the computer room. The place was a wreck.
“What the floods?” he hissed.
He waded through an ankle-deep layer of candy wrappers and empty tin cans of Pump Cola. The two computers had been left on; their fans whirred with an annoying clatter, and both machines were adorned with a half dozen twinkling, blue lights. The chairs in front of each were sprinkled with cookie crumbs and the tell-tell orange smears of Chedder Puffs. The room also reeked of sweaty Palan, of worry and agitation. Walter even nosed a bit of raw dread, the sort of smell he associated with the soon-to-be-dead. He’d seen some nasty last minute hack sessions in his time, but the scene before him beat all. As he lowered himself to the edge of the less-ruined chair, he noted someone’s code had been left up on the monitor. One glance, and he pegged its owner for the one reeking of death-dread. The code was more of a mess than the room.
Walter fought the urge to clean the code up a bit, knowing it was an irrational compulsion and very un-Palan-like. He closed his eyes, bent forward, and blew out as hard as he could across the keyboard. Bits of pizza crust and flood-knows-what-else peppered his face. He wiped his cheeks with both hands and shivered. Part of him considered sabotaging the water pumps prior to the coming flood, just to give the joint a good rinse.