DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) by Andrew Seiple Page B

looking it up, it would appear to belong to one Shaundi Saint, who’d bought and registered it six years ago. I decided on a generic mix of numbers and letters for the plate, and started running a pair off on the metal-grade three-dimensional printer. They’d need a little dirt and weathering too, but I could take care of that in the morning.
    All that took perhaps twenty minutes to get moving. I headed upstairs, content to let the machines finish their duty. I’d made them, and programmed every bit of their code myself or through a compiler of my own design. They wouldn’t let me down.
    Martin was pacing when I walked into the room. “It’s good,” I said. “Business is done.”
    “Aight. Make sure you do the rag thing. Got broth on the stove, and rags soaking in a pot of water.”
    “Understood. Go, sleep.”
    He headed out, and I settled in to keep watch over Bunny.
    I did pretty well for the first hour. Fed her twice, gave her water three times. Bunny sucked greedily at the rag whenever I pushed it into her mouth, so I assumed it was working. She still didn’t wake up enough to talk, and I didn’t want to try rousing her.
    After the first hour, it was pretty boring. I brewed up some coffee, and that occupied five minutes, but soon I was counting the minutes.
    One of the downsides to my power is that my mind needs things to work on. It needs constant stimulation, as much and as often as I can manage. Without it I get bored beyond any regular human’s understanding, and time stretches unbearably. It’s not exactly attention deficit disorder, more of a constant need to build and create mixed with an absolute loathing of wasted time. I’m pretty sure many other engineers would recognize some of the same symptoms.
    I killed ten minutes by going back to the hacked DMV databases, and making up false licenses for Shaundi Saint and her boyfriend, Tommy Grand. Easy enough to transfer photos of one of my cover identities. After a pause to consider my work, I retrieved a good shot of Martin from my mask’s camera, and altered the details a bit to a look he’d be able to achieve with minor makeup.
    I took longer then I needed to do this, but eventually it had to end. Then I got up and gave Bunny water again. This time she didn’t suck on the rag. I bent my head down, listened to her breath. It could be snoring. Maybe.
    Wait. I did have something to do, didn’t I? I paced back to the front room. I remembered seeing the business suit here, tossed over a chair after Martin changed. Sure enough, it was there, and a search of its pockets turned up the memory stick that we’d gotten from our client.
    I stared at the thing, and shut the laptop I’d used for the minor hacking required for the DMV record shuffling. Then I opened the secret panel in the back of the janitorial closet, to reveal the real computer.
    I’d spent almost twenty thousand dollars, all told, for the various components that made this hardware up. And then, on top of that, I’d added some of my own improvements. It had taken five straight days to do up the custom code, and make sure everything played well together. The coolant it required to operate could probably double as a fire suppressant in a pinch.
    I waved the stick at it, and the lights adorning the front of it flashed, as the scanners did their work, reading it without going through the trouble of slotting it in.
    The lights went red. A virus? Hm. Not very sporting of our client.
    “Quarantine stage one,” I commanded. “Oh, and activate holo-interface.”
    A blue light sprang to life on the side, and painted the room in the glowing shape of my own customized operating system. I reached out and opened up the quarantine box, studied the raw code of the virus as it spooled by.
    Clever little thing. A passive trojan, that would find its way through most firewalls without tripping alarms. Time-delayed, too, so there would be no warning until the time came and it activated. Maybe not even then,