Chapter 16

Qi spent the night sleeping on a hospital bed, with his head elevated. The sensation of a full mattress under him was unsettling. As he lay there waiting for sleep to overwhelm him, the cushiness reinforced feelings of weakness and helplessness. His sleep was dreamless.

Waking up was confusing. There was a body next to him in the bed and her breath was tickling his neck. He knew it was a "she" because her breasts were pressing into his arm and side. Tears started running down his face.

"What's wrong, fuck bunny," Quiyo said softly. Her fingers rubbed away the tears on one side of his face.

"I did this..." he said. "I did this for you. All of this craziness, the work under Benni, the jumping to deep space facilities, sailing through space – I did it because I want you just like this, at my side. I didn't want to lose you and I almost lost myself."

"Did Shadowlands find a willing squaw who stole his..." she stopped herself. "I've got to cut back on those damn serials."

"It's too soon to ask, Quiyo. I know the rules," Qi said. "I will ask you. As sure as the black hole beats in the center of the galaxy, I'm gonna ask you."

"You promise?" she said.

"You promise not tell anyone that I was crying," Qi said. "No one cries in the Shadowlands. You keep your promise and I'll keep mine."

She reached up and kissed his cheek, following his trail of tears.

The peace lasted a moment, until door opened. "Even in the medical bay you have to nail her to the mattress?"

"Good day, Benni," Qi said with a sigh. "Pardon me if I don't get up. I'm a bit downgraded from flash."

"I've been there and done that," Benni said, turning behind him. "Ree, get your sister out of my assistant's bed. There is work to be done and she is in the way, again."

Quiyo gave the patriarch a sour look before she rolled her eyes. "Now I understand where all the men in the Family get it from," Quiyo said as she rolled out of bed and straightened her blouse. "If the patriarch is a vat grubber, then..."

"Then everyone spends their time cleaning up his shit," Benni finished her sentence. "Go, little one. We have work to do. You can have him back next shift."

Quiyo left leaving Benni and his entourage with Qi. Someone hit the button and raised Qi to a sitting position. His body, especially his stomach, protested the shifting position of his body but Qi refused to say a word of complaint.

"This isn't a sick call," Qi said as he looked at gathered group.

"No," Benni said. "This is a glicking call."

"Glooking," someone else said. "He gloocks"

"Sounds vaguely nasty," Benni said. "We retrieved your comp from your suit but we cannot make heads or tails of it. Veethan said you found a lot of shit about the corporation that we could use. We need to know if this is so, quickly."

"Did the facility blow?" Qi asked. His curiosity was fierce.

"Funny thing about that," Benni said. "You were right; there was a failsafe. You were correct also that they were a bunch of cheap bastards. Either they never installed the charges to blow the station or someone removed them a long time ago. Unfortunately, when Chemung ordered the bay airlock blown, he did nearly the same job. The building looks like a pocked asteroid now."

As Benni talked, Qi booted up his comp. He pulled the first file and stared at the gibberish for a moment. He had seen such nonsensical words before but he could not recall where or why. He brought up a second file with the same results. He knew that he was not at his best and the muzziness in his head was slowing him down. Looking up, he realized that everyone was looking at him expectantly.

"Why don't you guys go bet on the next round in the fighting pit," Qi said. "All of you staring at me are making me nervous."

"Performance anxiety," Riata said with mock seriousness. "I've seen it before and it isn't pretty."

"You are worse than he is," Qi said, pointing at Benni. He shook his head and rolled his eyes, recognizing at the moment that Quiyo had just done the same thing.

"Riata, shut up," Benni said. "Qi focus."

"Hang on," Qi said. "The easiest solution is often the best, especially in a case when the owner is not expecting espionage. This was an archive after all. I'm going to bring up the binary code on this file."

"Phfft," one of the entourage said. "Ancient and outdated in our age: you are wasting our time."

"Ancient, stable and quite reliable," Qi said. "Also, the binary format is a perfect fallback for glookers with ignorant, overbearing overseers. Supervisory programs don't scan small clips of binary code. Besides, all I really need to see are the beginning and the ending strings."

"Nope, not the beginning," Qi said as he scanned the code. "Ah, what do we have here? Let me translate into letters. D-I-P-P-E-R D-A-N, which means Diper Dan. We have the encryption code."

"What is Dipper Dan," Benni said with a touch of annoyance.

"Dipper Dan was a famous hair product for men before the space age, hair grease," Qi said. "Such arcane facts are very flash for glookers and it is a part of unwritten toolkits. For us, Dipper Dan is short for D on the proton followed by D on the neutron. It is shorthand for a simple encryption code and its starting points.

"This is college level, standard, gloocking problem set solving. My best guess is that the programmer knew that no one would retrieve these documents for years, decades or even centuries and he didn't trust TSC to keep the encryption codes available. So, he buried the key at the end of the binary code, which is fairly common practice for boring documents. I used to do tens of these problem sets a week in school."