Paquete Drop

DEF CON 323 had gone well so far. Modulo one incident in which a young pod jockey’s “prank” nearly asphyxiated everyone in the Ethical Cloning Village, the conference was running smoothly.

Smoothly for everyone except Norodi. She had a problem: as a representative for the asteroid 65 Cybele, and as an operator for PaqNet, she was expected to pursue her home’s best interests at the conference. She was expected to connect with other operators to help put the precarious future of the Cybelian internet on the right path. So far, she had chosen to honor this responsibility by running around the villages and getting trashed every night.

But it was the last day of DEF CON, and Norodi was determined to make something out of her trip. So she headed over to the hall hosting the PaqNet Operators’ Meetup. On the way to the meetup, Norodi bumped into Kacy, a friend and fellow operator hailing from Enceladus. She nudged Norodi. “Hey you. Where have you been for the last few days?”

Norodi was too hung over to figure out a convincing cover story, so she simply responded with “I’ve been wasting my time doing everything except what I was supposed to do.”

Kacy laughed. “Then let’s fix that, shall we?”

The year’s meetup began, as it always did, with a summary of the network’s accomplishments over the previous year. Thirty-two new nodes had joined the network, bringing the total number of nodes to one hundred and sixteen. Most nodes were averaging fifty petabits of data exchanged with their peers per day, and the longest path in the network – the largest amount of time it could take an update from any space platform’s, lunar colony’s, or asteroid outpost’s intranet to propagate across PaqNet – had been reduced to five days. This last point drew a polite round of applause from the audience.

Kacy and Norodi spent the day bouncing between talks. One talk discussed operations research for paquete optimization. Another covered paquete security, basic opsec for node technicians, and secure tape encryption. The day ended with a keynote from Kelli Adachi, one of the original founders of PaqNet. After a long introduction listing Kelli’s achievements and contributions to the PaqNet community, she stepped up to the podium and began speaking.

“It’s always been difficult to get internet half a billion miles from Earth. Before PaqNet, the internet that you did get was also shit.

“We started PaqNet as an experiment between Europa and Callisto, before we gained our independence. In those days, the only internet you got was out of a VOCorp uplink, and it was awful. The standard uplink costed hundreds of thousands of credits, it could only be fixed up by an approved technician, and the corporation had a view into every single packet sent into the ether. And at first, there was nothing we could do. The only group with the infrastructure to stand up an interplanetary internet was VOCorp.

“Thanks to all of your contributions, PaqNet has become the de facto means of attaining internet for billions of people across the Solar System. More than that, it has liberated –”

A conference goon sped into the room and pulled Kelli aside, followed by some of the meetups’ organizers. They spoke in hushed tones to one another, and Kelli’s expression morphed from her usual confidence to shock, followed by dismay. Norodi glanced over at Kacy, who gave her an uncertain shrug in response.

A few minutes passed before Kelli finally took the podium again.

“I… I’m sorry for the interruption, everyone. This is a terrible time to deliver this news, but you should know as well: we just found out that VOCorp has purchased Earth’s PaqNet node.”

---

The Earth node had faced financial difficulties for a while. Compared to other nodes, paquetes sent from Earth face more atmospheric drag on the ascent and higher gravity, which meant greater fuel expenses. The node served one billion people on the surface of the planet, and – crucially – processed more traffic than every other node combined.

All of these factors made the node a vulnerable target, and a valuable one.

We should have seen this coming, Kacy thought. We should have; perhaps we did. Either way, we did nothing about it.

At the end of DEF CON, Kacy said her goodbyes to Norodi. “Before you go,” Kacy said, “take this. It’s got my long-term public key on it.”

She lifted a thumb drive out of her pocket and pressed it into Norodi’s palm. The two friends hugged, and parted ways.

If VOCorp had control over the Earth node, then it could see whatever traffic was passing through the node. Even if that traffic was encrypted, they would have means of telling where data was being sent to and from. They could identify the Enceladus node. They could identify Kacy. She had to get back before that happened.

She searched for the fastest ride she could get back to Enceladus. There weren’t any civilian shuttles making their way over to Saturn any time soon, and even if there were, it was too dangerous. Kacy couldn’t risk going through customs on Enceladus; she wasn’t supposed to be off-planet in the first place, especially for an underground hacker conference. Instead, Kacy hitched a ride from Europa, and from there she rode a paquete the rest of the way to Enceladus.

Most paquetes are purpose-built space vessels, designed to carry crates with dozens of petabytes’ worth of magnetic tapes from Point A to Point B. The paquete that Kacy had boarded had been expanded to include a tiny bathroom, a cupboard with a day’s worth of food, and bunks to accommodate four passengers; spartan accommodations for those who had no other means of travel. After a seemingly interminable flight cramped into a small box, the paquete started to shudder, and klaxons blared above Kacy’s head. They were beginning to decelerate as they closed in on Enceladus.

Kacy held tight to the railings of her bunk, preparing just in case the paquete exploded on its descent. PaqNet was, nominally, completely legal – and indeed, it operated freely and openly on the inner planets. But the charter that granted VOCorp its mandate over the outer Solar System allowed it to control all communications coming into or out of its stations. Whereas a VOCorp uplink was allowed to scan client traffic and report people for “subversion of VOCorp or VOCorp-affiliated entities” (in the words of the standard worker’s contract), PaqNet traffic was encrypted between nodes and allowed to carry whatever content users felt like. So VOCorp considered it a threat, and on the occasion that they were able to identify a paquete entering of their stations, they shot it down.

Kacy hoped that this wasn’t one of those occasions.

---

Norodi arrived at 65 Cybele and rode the tram back into the inner city. The tram had a good view overlooking the asteroid, and as it headed into town Norodi could still pick out the signs saying “WELCOME TO VOCORP - 65 CYBELE STATION”. Most of these signs had been torn down by the workers’ union years ago, when VOCorp was forced to abandon its administrative hold over the asteroid. 65 Cybele was lucky; many stations were still under corporate rule.

Like Enceladus Station. Her mind flitted towards Kacy; Norodi hoped that she had returned home safely.

Norodi hopped off the tram at the second-to-last stop. She crossed two rows of taco stands and walked through a small arts and crafts market. At the last block before her apartment, she passed by Cleo’s Scavenge and Repair. The titular Cleo was sitting in his workshop, typing furiously at his terminal. In spite of his wild hair and disheveled clothing, Cleo kept a tidy space; all surfaces were cleaned regularly, all chips and wires and bits and bobs stored in carefully-labeled drawers. On this particular occasion, Cleo had an additional visitor in his pristine workshop: a large, black tube, scratched from top to bottom. Paint was peeling off to reveal discolored metals underneath, and two fins protruded from each side, each hoisting a shattered solar panel.

Cleo perked up and flashed a big, goofy grin at Norodi as she passed by. “Heya Norodi, how was DEF CON?”

She winced. “It was alright, until the end. You heard about what happened?”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I still remember when this place was a corporate stronghold. We fought like hell, like hell. I gotta give it to those bastards, they still gotta lotta moxie to be keeping up with their schemes after so many years. I’m glad there’s kids like you to carry the torch and continue our side of the fight.”

Norodi shrugged. “I don’t think that running an underground sneakernet takes half as much courage as you think, but thanks.” She decided to change the topic. “What do you have back there?”

“Ah, this old hunka scrap?” he asked, jabbing a thumb towards the tube. “That’s an old Earth satellite. Used ta be that folks would shoot these up into orbit an use them as relays to send packets ta one another. Still a bunch of these floating ‘round Earth today. Pretty ancient tech, eh?”

“How’d you get it?”

“Fell off the back of a ship,” Cleo said. He gave Norodi a sly wink.

Norodi smirked. “Looks like fun. You pulled anything valuable off it yet?”

“Nah, it’s a huge time-waste. Spent a week tryna crack it and when I did, I found out that most of the storage degraded years ago. Shame. Antennas still work though, as do mosta the internal components, I just gotta find someone ta pawn it off on.” Cleo’s eyes narrowed. “You in the market for an antique satellite?”

Norodi laughed. “I don’t think so, but thanks. See you around, Cleo.”

He waved Norodi off and set back to work at his terminal. When Norodi returned to her apartment, the first thing she did was hop on her computer to see whether any messages had arrived from Kacy. She was relieved to see the message at the top of her inbox:

“<kacy (Enceladus)> Hey. I got back alright. Miss ya already -K”

---

Several weeks passed after DEF CON, and a problem was starting to form before Kacy. She didn’t know quite what the problem was yet, although she had a general sense of its size and shape.

Her problem started with the disappearance of a node technician.

In a PaqNet router, each node technician is tasked with two responsibilities: pulling tapes off of paquetes, and putting them back on. Each paquete carries hundreds of tapes, and each tape carries hundreds of terabytes of PaqNet updates – large media files, encrypted chat messages, forum threads, news, books, posts – anything that a PaqNet user might feasibly wish to upload to the internet. When a paquete arrives at the Enceladus router, each tape is carried off of the paquete and loaded into a reader, where its contents are used to synchronize the state of the Enceladus intranet with the PaqNet at large. Once a node receives enough updates from its peers – and enough new content uploaded from its own intranet – it is responsible for passing along updates to other nodes. And so it goes, with the daily rhythm of a node tech converging towards a cycle of unloading tapes from paquetes, reading them in, loading new tapes onto paquetes, and sending them off.

One evening, a tech left work and didn’t return the following morning. Or the morning after.

This alone was cause enough for concern, but there were other signs that something was amiss. Scheduled paquetes were failing to arrive, and the ones that did contained more corrupted data. Each tape that went through the Enceladus router was scanned for malicious content, but none of them ever raised any flags.

Kacy was not yet aware that in a storage closet just a hundred meters outside of the router, locked in the darkness, a device had turned on. She was not yet aware that for the last several days it had been issuing its silent report to a VOCorp carrier ship that was now in transit to Enceladus. She was not yet aware of the danger that she was in.

---

Probably the most irritating part of VOCorp’s incursion into PaqNet, in Norodi’s opinion, was their introduction of VOCorp Integrated Advertising (TM) into updates sent from Earth paquetes. Norodi spent an hour or two each day scouring instances of

BUY MARTIAN FOREIGN FILMS >>>HERE<<<

and

paq://hottiez.prn/xzBt8g1f FIND HOTTIES IN YOUR SPACEPORT

that had been injected into various websites. This was primarily a nuisance, but occasionally something more insidious would be slipped into an update. Embedded scripts designed to phone home to some shady VOCorp affiliate, or implants precision-targeted for specific individuals’ PaqNet terminals.

If Norodi felt unfazed by these challenges, it was because she had experienced them before. VOCorp had spent many years engaging in subterfuge against the network, intercepting paquetes, and flipping operators. The only difference now was how much more brazen it had become.

Norodi received a text from a tech in the 65 Cybele router that one of the tape readers was malfunctioning; the team wanted her expertise to diagnose the issue. As she left her apartment she passed Cleo once again – hard at work disassembling some inscrutable device, too busy even for a passing “hello” – and made her way down to the tram. Once she arrived at the router, she found the lead technician.

“Hey, I got a message that the reader isn’t working. What happened?”

The tech gave her a shrug. “We received a paquete this morning from 41 Daphne. The reader started making a funny noise while it was running through one of the tape spools, and then it stopped. I’ve been busy all day and this seemed more like your wheelhouse, so we gave you a ring.”

Norodi jacked into the reader’s serial port to inspect its logs. The firewall logs indicated a large number of packets blocked against several hundred devices connected to the router’s local area network. A forward proxy contained records of several failures to authenticate against different devices on the network, and ended with one successful HTTP response. The device was named vocup-27.rtinternal.cybele.pqn.

“Hey, do you have any VOCorp communications equipment laying around?” Norodi asked.

The tech looked puzzled. “We have an old uplink lying in storage. We used to use it for emergency broadcasts, but it’s been broken for almost as long as I’ve been here.”

Norodi felt her stomach starting to turn. She ejected the tape from the reader and saved off a dump of the system’s memory to analyze in her homelab.

But before she could go home, she had to ask Cleo about his satellites.

---

The message from Norodi arrived late at night, encrypted and sealed with the key that Kacy had given her at DEF CON. Kacy was taking a big risk by checking her inbox, but this would be her last chance before she left Enceladus.

“<norodi (65 Cybele)> Do not respond. Do NOT respond.

“I’ve identified a malware campaign that VOCorp appears to be running against PaqNet crews. VOCorp is exploiting a zero-day in the tape deserialization software to reach out to old equipment that operators still have installed in their routers and ping their command-and-control servers. The bottom line is this: they’re targeting operators now, and you’re in danger.

“65 Cybele got lucky – all of our VOCorp equipment is broken beyond repair, and the implant crashed while trying to inject itself into a defective VOCorp uplink. You probably won’t be so fortunate. When you finish reading this, find and destroy any VOCorp equipment that may still be attached to your network. Do not wait for them to knock on your door.

“The current situation is untenable, but I have a plan. Meet me on Luna in one week.”

Oh Norodi. If only her message had come just a bit sooner.

Kacy hadn’t known about the zero-day, but she’d intuited the rest of the details after VOCorp had raided Enceladus’s router three days earlier. All of the technicians who were present at the time were arrested, and then forced to keep the router operational. By now VOCorp would already have started injecting a beacon into every message sent via PaqNet into the Enceladan intranet, and in Kacy’s estimation, they would roll up every remaining PaqNet operator who’d fled by the end of the week.

Including her. And now that Kacy had pulled data from her inbox into her local PaqNet terminal, they would know where to find her. Kacy threw the terminal into the nearest garbage disposer and broke into a sprint.

Kacy couldn’t ride a paquete out of Enceladus with the router compromised. She couldn’t board a passenger shuttle either; even in better times, they were under strict watch by corporate authorities. Almost all cargo shipments out of the moon had been shut down. That left Kacy with exactly one option.

She would need to steal a VOCorp ship.

Luckily, VOCorp had disavowed the classic analog interface preferred by most pilots for a purely digital flying experience. This made VOCorp ships easy to fly – and easy to hack. Kacy had phished the employee credentials from several corporate security officers over the last couple of days. She found one that matched the profile that she sought: a mid-career pilot with permissions to enter and exit the Enceladan space port at will, and to fly any unreserved ship with a Type B or lower rating.

Kacy stopped running as she closed in on the spaceport. She walked over to a door leading in to the ship lot. The door was equipped with a badge scanner, but Kacy had come prepared. She took a blank radio-frequency card out of her backpack, wrote the pilot’s credentials to it, and swiped the card against the scanner.

The scanner emitted a sharp bzzzt and flashed a red light at her. Bad identification. Kacy threw away the card and tried a different one. If the scanner didn’t accept her credentials, then her escape would be very short-lived. She pressed the second card against the scanner.

This time, it gave her a happy chirp and flashed green. Kacy passed through the door and headed towards the closest ship that she could find, a small passenger shuttle typically used to carry ambassadors, dignitaries, and other people of note. She entered the pilot’s username and password, and the ship’s dashboard came to life. Kacy searched the ship’s directory for its list of prerecorded destinations, and found the one she was looking for: Luna, Earth’s moon. She set the ship on autopilot and buckled into her seat.

She felt the acceleration push down against her when the ship’s thrusters ignited. As the ship escaped Enceladus’s gravity she felt the pressure against her lighten. She would make it.

---

Norodi refitted a paquete with seat, a dashboard, and a pilot’s yoke to take her from 65 Cybele to Luna, where she reconnected with Kacy. After three stuffy paquete rides, four repair stations visited in search of parts, one count of sneaking past lunar customs officials, and six trips from the moon to Earth’s orbit and back, she was on her seventh and final trip. Norodi prayed in full view of the heavens that she wouldn’t be picked up by an wandering VOCorp scout before finishing her job.

“Norodi, I just got my last satellite working over India,” said Kacy over her microphone. “I’m finishing some repairs over here, and then I’m heading back. How are things looking on your end?”

“Not great,” Norodi said, being honest. “The last two satellites I tried were totally busted.”

“Keep at it. We’re at ninety-nine percent coverage.”

Cleo had given them a set of instructions to follow. First, they should run basic diagnostics to determine whether the satellite was functional, or whether the circuity had degraded too far from radiation. If it was still operational, then they would connect to its serial line and run Cleo’s exploit. Assuming the exploit ran successfully, the satellite would connect to their makeshift satellite network. Norodi was waiting for the second step to complete, idly watching the spinner on her display as the exploit tried to gain remote code execution on the satellite that she was connected to.

For his part, Cleo was finishing setting up a router on the far side of the moon. He’d spent the previous days getting in touch with PaqNet operators on the ground to prepare them for the final stage of the plan. A plan that, so far, had run smoothly. Kacy had succeeded in evading the authorities on Enceladus to reach Norodi and Cleo. They had succeeded in completing six trips in and out of Earth’s orbit. Everything was fine. Everything apart from these damned old, broken satellites.

Cleo had told Norodi and Kacy that because the satellites would primarily be relaying data back and forth from the moon, only a subset of them would actually need to work. Which was fortunate, as Norodi was already at the limit of her patience. If the exploit failed on the satellite that she was working on now, she thought she might start hitting it with a wrench until it worked.

Kacy’s voice crackled over the mic: “I’m back on my ship, and heading back towards the spaceport.”

Norodi said nothing. She was too focused now. This is it. It’ll work this time, she thought to herself.

Finally, text splashed across her display:

EXPLOIT SUCCESSFUL
CONNECTING TO NETWORK...
ACQUIRED ID SAT-0277
CONNECTING TO ROUTER...
CONNECTED TO RT-DARK_SIDE_OF_THE_MOON
AWAITING UPLINK

Norodi disconnected and headed back towards her ship.

---

Before Kacy could drive her moon rover back to the central spaceport, she would have to scuttle the ship she’d stolen. She couldn’t let anyone find out that she had been here, much less what she was up to. She identified a quiet spot in the Pacific Ocean where the ship could crash unnoticed and set the ship on autopilot.

In a few minutes their work would be done. In a few minutes, several hundred satellites would wake up from a century-long slumber and start relaying data to Cleo’s surreptitious router. And the router would send its first paquete out to the rest of PaqNet. The planet – and everyone else – would be free from VOCorp’s stranglehold.

First, Kacy wanted to get a drink.

She parked the rover outside of a service airlock. Anybody who was monitoring entry into the station would see her spacesuit – stolen when she and Norodi and Cleo had first landed on the moon – and assume that she had just gotten back from a maintenance run. That was her hope, in any case. Once she got through the airlock, she slipped into the spaceport and headed over to one of the bars.

Kacy sat down and ordered a couple of martinis for herself and for Norodi and started to reflect on the past couple of days. Where would she go next? She couldn’t return to Enceladus; by now she was a wanted fugitive. Norodi had told her that she would always have a home on Cybele 65. That seemed like a nice idea.

The martinis arrived, and Kacy started to take a sip, to relax in her seat, when all of a sudden some instinct in the corner of her brain noticed it. The uncomfortable stillness in the air. The empty chairs and tables that surrounded her. The nervous bartender, peering in her direction. And then she felt a polite tap on her shoulder.

“Hello miss. Do you have a few minutes to chat with us?”

She turned around to find a couple of well-groomed men in expensive suits standing behind her. One of them folded his arms, and Kacy saw the briefest flash of a pistol from inside his sports coat.

She pushed past both of them and ran. She ran back towards the airlock. She’d warn Norodi. She’d find another way off the moon. Another way to 65 Cybele. She just had to escape those men.

The last thing Kacy remembered was the butt of a rifle slamming into her chin.

---

Back on her ship, Norodi tapped her mic. “Cleo, how are you doing?”

“Mighty well, seems like,” Cleo said. “Me an’ my team just got the connection from yer last satellite. We ‘ave one hundred percent coverage over the planet now.”

“Excellent,” Norodi said, relieved. She was sick of the spacewalks. “I’ll see you soon.” Norodi switched channels over to Kacy. “I’m finished over here, I’m headed back to Luna. Let me know when you’ve landed.”

She aligned the ship’s trajectory with the moon and engaged her thrusters. As she approached the moon, two dots appeared on the horizon. Ships emblazoned with the VOCorp logo. One of the ships automatically connected itself to the ship’s intercom and its mechanical voice came in over the ship’s speakers. “NORODI OLERUD OF 65 CYBELE – YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. STOP IMMEDIATELY AND PREPARE TO BE BOARDED.”

This can’t be how it ends. This can’t. It can’t. Norodi spiraled into a panic. She had everything on the ship’s computers – Cleo’s exploit, an inventory of all of the satellites they had gained access to. Everything. She couldn’t let them take the ship.

She floored it.

The moon came into full view. Klaxons blared over Norodi’s head. You’re going to die, they told her. She kept accelerating anyways. A missile sailed past and rocked the ship. “CEASE IMMEDIATELY”, the voice boomed. She pushed the pedal even harder. She started to see Luna’s texture. Its ridges. Individual rocks.

She ejected.

The world spun around Norodi. She didn’t hear the ship as it slammed into Luna, only saw a bright light, followed by a million million fragments of metal and plastic and rock scattering themselves into space. The world continued to spin; Earth, moon, and stars locked in some frenetic dance as her vision blurred. And she fell, fell for what seemed like a lifetime, pulled into the moon’s gentle embrace until she was a thousand feet, a hundred feet, ten feet above the surface.

Her chair engaged mini-thrusters and stopped the descent at the last moment. Norodi couldn’t stand up, couldn’t run. Two gruff pairs of hands pulled her out of her chair and hauled her into the back of a rover. They zip tied her and locked the doors, and then the rover started to move. The homogeneous landscape of the moon rolled underneath her, while the sparkling cloud of debris left by her ship receded into the horizon. Hours passed.

The rover stopped, and the hands pulled Norodi out of her cage in the back of the rover and back onto the surface. She could see now that they had arrived at a nondescript building tucked into the wall of a crater. The people who had seized her dragged her inside the building and ordered her to take off her suit. She did. Then they walked her down an aisle, past windows peering into dark rooms. At one point she passed a room with a bloody mess of a woman, slumped across the floor. It was Kacy.

“Kacy! Kacy!” Norodi screamed. She screamed and screamed until all she could hear was ringing in her ears. Kacy didn’t respond.

---

Kacy awoke with the taste of copper in her mouth. She was in a concrete room, dimly lit, her hands and feet bound together. The two men that had approached Kacy at the bar entered the room, and the questions began.

“How did you find out about the implant?”

“Who have you told?”

“Why are you out here?”

“Where were you running to?”

Neither of the men asked Kacy about Cleo or paquetes or satellites or a mysterious PaqNet router that had suddenly appeared on the other side of the moon. They don’t know, Kacy thought to herself. She repeated it to herself over and over again, a mantra, or perhaps a prayer. They don’t know. They don’t know. They don’t know.

The men beat Kacy for hours. She said nothing.

Eventually they left her alone. Kacy’s body was wracked with pain from head to toe. She watched idly as her own blood dripped onto the ground and dried. Eventually one of the men reentered the room, and knelt in front of her.

“We saw the message between you and your friend before you left Enceladus. We know you know about the implant.”

Kacy didn’t respond. He still wasn’t asking about satellites.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, a thin smile across his lips. “Your friend notified everyone else before she left 65 Cybele. She sent them a sample of the implant, and details about the zero-day. Now some jackass has written some detections for the implant, and another jackass has written a patch for the tape deserialization software, and everybody’s getting their detections set up and their devices patched. She did a good job. We’re burnt.”

“Serves you right,” Kacy said.

The man shrugged. “That cost us a few million credits, but this company is worth tens of trillions. We’re worth more than most governments.” He leaned in. “We’ll manage.”

“We’ll stop you again. It doesn’t matter what you throw at us. For every one of you there’s five of us, working in the dark.”

“You know, if it wasn’t us, it’d be someone else. Someone a lot nastier, a lot meaner. Somebody who wouldn’t think twice about throwing you and your pal out of the airlock.” The man stood up. “But we’re nice, and truthfully, there really isn’t much you can do for us anymore. So you’re coming back with us to Enceladus to face trial for unapproved abandonment of your assigned station, for the theft of a VOCorp ship, and for subversion of the state in the service an illegal interplanetary communications platform. And your friend is going back to her asteroid, where she will be barred from transiting through any VOCorp-owned spaceport for the rest of her life.”

He cut the zip ties around Kacy’s hands and feet and opened the door to exit the room, gesturing towards her. Kacy picked herself up off the ground, and limped through the exit.

It was a long ride back to the spaceport. Kacy sat in the back of the vehicle, unbound and alone. The guards that were driving hadn’t even bothered to lock the back door. It’s not like she could escape; without a suit, she would die in seconds if she exited the vehicle. And there was nowhere left for her to escape in any case.

Kacy caught one last glimpse of Norodi at the spaceport. She was being escorted onto the boarding ramp of a shuttle going back to Enceladus, when a group of armed guards entered the loading bay. Norodi – as battered and bruised as she was – stood in between them. As Kacy ascended the ramp, she shot one last look at Norodi. Though beaten and pained, Norodi could make out a clear expression in her face, in the burning intensity with which Kacy was staring. Kacy knew that they’d won.

---

Norodi never spoke a word about the satellite network. When she was dropped off at 65 Cybele, she was informed that she would never again be allowed to step onto VOCorp property, but was otherwise free to go.

Norodi rode the tram back to the inner city of 65 Cybele once more. She gazed out the window, across the rock, to the Cybelian PaqNet router. She saw a paquete fly out of the router, shimmering against the void, its thrusters faint lights as it accelerated towards its next stop. Norodi wondered at what the paquete was carrying: messages to loved ones separated by billions of miles of vacuum; missives from the lives of tens of thousands people living on a rock as it completed another journey around the sun.

On this trip, the old VOCorp signs looked just a little more worn than before.

Norodi got off at the second-to-last stop and passed the rows of taco stands and the market and turned at the last block before her apartment and hoped, hoped she would see the big, goofy grin that she had been waiting for. The garage door at Cleo’s Scavenge and Repair was raised.

Cleo was at his workbench, wearing his signature grin across his face. “Heya, kid.”

Norodi felt tears start to well up. Thoughts like did it work and I didn’t tell them anything about you and I don’t know if she’s okay, and I miss her so much all passed through her head. The only words that she could think to say, though, were “I’m so glad you made it out alright.”

“Of course!” Cleo laughed. “I’ve been runnin’ from those bastards almost as long as you’ve been alive.”

Norodi wiped away the tears and smiled.

Cleo pulled his terminal over to Norodi. The interface displayed a table with columns labeled “DEVICE”, “STATUS”, “LAST PING”, “COORDINATES”. “I ran some tests, all of yer satellites are hooked up now. The two of you did well.” He gave Norodi a bittersweet smile. “My crew on Luna has their paquetes set up, and the operators on the ground are ready to start sendin’.”

Norodi turned to Cleo, eyes bright. “Then let’s start receiving.”