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It was a short drive from the airstrip to her home outside Saint Petersburg, but after last week’s “breach”, Katya’s security was not taking any chances.
“The Breach.” That was the euphemism everyone was using. For the most tense, terrifying five minutes of her life, Katya’s crucial work had slowed to a crawl to repeat her story in excruciating detail to packs of hounding acronyms; the FSB, SVR, GRU- even Interpol had been allowed to debrief her, though their interest had waned quickly after they established that the closest she’d come to the Widowmaker was a sniper-bullet that had passed scant centimeters from her head.
“What about the woman in purple?” Katya had asked them, eager for even a scrap of information. There’d been no trace of her in their computer networks, nothing on the cameras. If not for the surviving guards that had caught a glimpse of her, she could have been a figment Katya’s imagination. If only she were that lucky.
Except all they had to offer was a long-winded explanation about unsubstantiated rumors, high-profile cybercrimes, and pattern recognition that boiled down to the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug.
Of course there was nothing. Like chasing a shadow.
“Chairman Volskaya? Is everything alright?”
“I’m fine, Ekaterina,” Katya said, voice calm and under control. “Just a bit tired.”
Her assistant nodded with an affirmative little hum and went back to typing away at whatever work her glasses were projecting. She was a sharp, dedicated young woman who had most likely cropped her blonde hair short for efficiency sake, rather to be fashionable. Katya had left her back at the office while she inspected new line ofSvyatogors. It had probably saved her life.
Ekaterina had been in top form all week, keeping up with Katya’s emails when she was locked away for hours with that day’s letters of the alphabet, ran interference with Volskaya Industries’ panicking board of directors, fetched her dry cleaning, took her calls, and made the arrangements for her daughter and mother to be moved to a more secure location.
Katya could also tell that she’d been anxious all week and doing her best to hide it, but the extra security measures only seemed to make her more nervous. They had to share the back of the SUV with a pair of silent Volskaya Security Agents, rolling in a convoy of four more identical vehicles towards her home- which her Chief of Security had assured her was not only being patrolled by armed men but a pair of Svyatogors, stomping around the yard her daughter played in.
The convoy rolled up Katya’s half-kilometer driveway and slowed. One of the Agents brought a finger to his ear. “Rabotnitsa is on site.” He listened to a response, then nodded to her.
“Ms. Volskaya,” Ekaterina adjusted her glasses apprehensively. “Would you like me to join you, this evening?”
Katya put a steady hand on her knee. “Go home, dorogáya. Get some rest. I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will, ma’am. Please try to get some sleep.”
“I will try,” Katya said, and slid out when the door was opened for her. A wall of men in dark suits encircled her, forming a protective ring of bodies that marched in perfect tandem with Katya and her Chief of Security.
“We’ve just finished our second sweep of the house, Ms. Volskaya.” He briefed her, indicating the patrols of heavily armed security. “There are several squads providing overlapping coverage, counter-snipers hidden on the grounds, and of course the Svyatogors, for good measure.”
Overkill, Katya thought. Or not nearly enough. Her face betrayed nothing. “Well done, Imrich. Thank you.”
They left the wall of men at the front door and entered the house. No childrens’ holos running, no little feet pattering about, no dismayed nanny. Just more security in dark sunglasses standing strategically around her home. Katya ignored them and went down the long hall, past her daughter’s bedroom to her own. Imrich stood at the edge of the doorway, hands clasped behind him like he was at parade rest.
“It’s been a trying week. I do not wished to be disturbed unless it is an emergency,” Katya instructed.
“Of course, ma’am. We can monitor your biometrics from here. If you require anything, please let me or my men know.”
“I will, thank you. Good night.” She slid the door closed in his face and locked it. Exhaled a long sigh as though she’d been holding her breath ever since that woman in purple had appeared out of thin air and leveled a gun muzzle at her face.
Thankfully, her bedroom was spacious enough that she didn’t feel closed in. There was a huge bed, a comfortable couch in a corner, a desk to work at, and a bathroom bigger than her entire apartment back when she had been in University.
“Screens,” she told the room. A wall of holoscreens appeared, running her custom media preferences: Russia’s state-run TACC reporting on the worrying rise of pro-Omnic sentiments worldwide, a recorded lecture from the famed Winston about the applications of portable shield technology, the latest international stock indexes; she paused at a BBC news stream running footage from a skirmish between the ex-Overwatch Agent “Tracer” and the assassin Widowmaker- the same woman that had tried to kill Katya only a few days ago.
“Shower.” In the next room, the showerhead warmed up and starting spraying at Katya’s ideal temperature.
Just the promise of having her back be massaged by a jet of hot water made her shoulders ache. A bit stiffly, Katya pulled off her suit jacket and hung it up properly in the closet, unfastened her earrings and set them on her nightstand, then started on the first button of her blouse.
Behind her, static hiccuped from the screens. She turned, and found that all of the stations had been changed- a cheap Spanish telenovela, South American news spins, Hana Song playing in a video game tournament for charity. Some ridiculous children’s cartoon.
The woman in purple waved lazily from Katya’s couch. “If you’re gonna take a shower, don’t let me stop you.”
Katya glared at the back of her head. “You.”
She pivoted around and waggled her eyebrows. “Me.”
“What are you doing here?” Katya hissed. The screens’ volume and her shower running would probably drown out their voices, but there was still a small army on the other side of those walls.
“I’m not allowed to drop in and visit my good friend?”
“My friends don’t usually break into my home,” Katya replied icily.
“What breaking in? There was no breaking.” Cradling her hands behind her head, the hacker kicked up her feet and relaxed in Katya’s couch. As though she had every right to be there.
Katya ground her teeth, straightened her posture, and marched past the Hacker to get to her liquor cabinet.
“Oohh, pour one for me too, yeah?”
Katya slammed her glass on the counter and popped the stopper out of a crystal decanter. “Blackmailers don’t get the Good Brandy.”
“Blackmail is such an ugly word. Think of it like…a secret we’re sharing,” she twined her fingers. “Together.”
Pouring herself three fingers of brandy, Katya knocked back roughly half of it in a single gulp. It helped numb the unsteadiness in her nerves. She stood there, grip tight around the glass, composed herself. “So…friend. To what do I owe the visit?”
“I told you I’d be in touch. Had to wait while you ran the gauntlet of crusty old spooks and bureaucrats. Nice work crafting a cover-story so quick, by the way. Very convincing.”
Katya almost foolishly asked how she could have known the contents of all of those classified debriefings. She took another hard, bitter sip of her drink. “No thanks to you.”
The Hacker brought her sharp fingers to her chest in mock hurt. “Are you saying this is my fault, amiga?”
“Your idea of a ‘meeting’ involved two psychopaths shooting at me, nine innocent men losing their lives, and leaving me to answer all of the questions.” Katya felt a sharp tick her throat, voice an octave too high as her composure slipped. She stood up a bit straighter, chin raised to better look down on the purple woman on her sofa, infuriatingly bemused. “You could have just as easily done then as you are doing now, instead of a high-profile attack that attracted the attention of half of Russia’s Intelligence services.”
“Hey, don’t blame me,” she raised her hands. “None of that was my idea. I prefer to stay in the shadows- but when I caught wind that Talon was planning to eight-six you, I had to…improvise a little.”
“You call that improvisation?”
“I had to put myself out there enough for Talon to take an interest, then arrange it all so they thought it was all their idea to recruit me for the job in the first place.” She crossed her arms, cocking her head with a vainglorious swagger. “If I hadn’t been there, you can bet Señor Shotgun and Charlotte’s Web would have killed half of that base before they got to you.”
“Are you saying I should be grateful?”
Her purple lips pouted. “A ‘thank you’ wouldn’t hurt.”
Very much doubting that, Katya finished the last of her brandy, set the glass down, and poured herself another drink.
The Hacker opined behind her. “You know, you’re making this more difficult than it needs to be.”
“Should I somehow make this easier for you?” Katya asked.
“No, you could be making this easier for you,” The Hacker said. “I can be a very good friend to have.”
“Does that include tying treason charges around my neck?”
“So I’m a bit of a fetichista,” she shrugged, conjuring a holographic keyboard with a lazy hand motion. Katya tracked the fluid movements of her fingers, deft as a pianist, making purple ripples with each keystroke. “Doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some…” Sharp purple nails plucked something out of the air. “Benefits.”
In her palm was a cube of condensed data. She flicked it across the room, and Katya caught it instinctively. She started into the squirming, shifting code incredulously.
“How well do you know Afanasy Alekseevich?” The Hacker asked.
Enough to hate being in a room with him, Katya thought. “He’s the CEO of Svarog Tek.”
“Your chief competitor.”
“A distant second.”
She gestured airily. “Well, not everyone has the advantage of your…supplier.”
Katya scowled. “Is there a point to this?”
“See for yourself.”
Slowly, Katya spread the cube out until it formed collage of holographic files. Bank statements, private emails, audio recordings. She picked one out of the array and examined a picture of Alekseevich, balding and dressed in a garish suit, in the middle of arguing with a man she didn’t recognize.
“How do you think the Russian government would react to one their contractors dipping into funds meant for national defense?” The Hacker wondered. “Or that -while engaging in very illegal industrial espionage against Volskaya Industries and their government liasons- they endangered national security during wartime?”
Katya bristled. “That impotent little- he was spying on me?”
“No te preocupes. The freelance black hats he hired weren’t nearly as good as me. I had some fun giving them the run-around while I was putting together this little goody bag for you.”
“For me?” Katya looked at her, surprised.
“Do what you want with it: blackmail him, save it for a rainy day, slip it to one of your contacts and Moscow; the Omnium are occupying most of the old gulags in Siberia, but I’m sure there’s a few left they could throw him in. Or they could just put him in front of a firing squad, I guess.” She tapped a purple nail thoughtfully on her chin. “They do take treason pretty seriously around here, don’t they?”
So that was her angle- a threat gift-wrapped as a show of generosity, like a present that came with a warning label. A little reminder of what she was capable of…and of the consequences.
Katya closed her fist, pulling all the incriminating material back into the innocuous little holo-cube. Palm sized and weapons-grade, capable of ending a life. Destroying a company and the livelihoods of everyone who worked there. “This is what it’s like for you? To hold a person’s darkest secrets in the palm of your hand?”
The Hacker summoned another holocube and tossed it, spilling out a ream of files that she shuffled and jumped into her other hand like a magician pulling tricks with a deck of cards. “If you hold the information, you hold all the cards.”
“Not all of the cards, Sombra.”
The hands clapped together, snuffing out the holos.
The Hacker slowly looked up a her, calculating eyes ringed with mascara like purple war-paint; they were back in Katya’s office at the factory staring at each other with a gun barrel between them. Katya did not blink, barely breathed but to take in the small surge of triumph because after hours of interrogation, replaying that moment in her head over and over instead of sleeping, managing only a too-short vid-call with her daughter, and reaching out to every legitimate and shadowy resource at her disposal- Katya finally had her name.
Sombra only laughed. “I knew there was a reason I liked you! Ha! Not bad, I’m actually impressed. Most people don’t make it as far as that.”
“I am not most people,” Katya reminded her.
“Oh, I knooow,” Sombra groaned. “Katya Volskaya, the Rabotnitsa that built the first svyatogor prototype with her own two hands. The Defender of Russia, safeguarding the people from the inhuman blah blah blah…” One hand miming a gabbing mouth, she leaned her elbow on the arm of the couch and propped her chin on the other hand. “I know you engineering types. Detailed, driven, exacting. Always agonizing over every detail, bad at delegating, constantly overseeing and looking over shoulders. Total control freaks.”
She cocked her head to the side, curious. “Did you obsess over not knowing anything about me? Did it help to finally get a name to go with the pretty face? Do you finally feel a little more…” Katya startled when Sombra faded away, reappearing a heartbeat later on her feet and a handsbreath away from her.
“…in Control?” Sombra finished.
Katya stepped back involuntarily. How had she-
“Here’s the thing, chica.” Sombra inched closer. “When you pull back the curtain and see things as they really are, you find out that everything and everyone are out of control. Barely managed chaos: corruption, famine, corporate greed, crime, poverty, mass extinctions, ecological disaster, mini-stock market crashes that nobody notices because they’re over and done in a microsecond. The whole world is always teetering right on the edge of some disaster or another. Control is an illusion.”
“It feels real enough to me.” Katya said, tone bitter and icy.
“Pfff,” she rolled her eyes. “I didn’t force you to make some secret deal with the only Omnics on earth that were willing to help a country full of people that hate them.”
Katya glared at her. She knew her own hypocrisy, but she would not let some…anarchic criminal judge her. She’d known that it was only a matter of time before the Omnium adapted to their tactics and technology- but Moscow still expected her to outpace and outmaneuver machines in an technological arms race!
It was pure desperation. Years of design failures and dead ends, always chained by resources or technological limitations. She knew there were other Omniums besides the one in Siberia. Omnics that other nations weren’t at war with. None of them were willing to trade weapons- many were even pacifists, but the guidance systems and defensive shields she negotiated for the newest svyatogor production line were a generation beyond what Russia could develop on her own.
It was the difference between survival and ruin. To keep Russia from teetering over the edge of oblivion.
To keep her daughter safe, Katya would have made deals with things far worse than Omnics.
Sombra noticed the grim look on her face. “Don’t take it so personally. I don’t trust anyone I don’t have a little something on. It’s like a security blanket for me.” She crossed her arms, pondering. “Y’know, I’m a little surprised you haven’t tried anything, yet.”
Katya thought of Zarya. “Like what?”
“Oh I dunno, you could liquidate all your assets, take your daughter, and run off to an Omnic-friendly enclave that doesn’t extradite to Russia. Like Numbani or Hong Kong. You could wait for most of the heat to blow over, maybe even rebuild with a new little tech start-up. You’d probably always have to look over your shoulder for some KGB thugs with a grudge, but you could make it work.”
Katya pretended to consider it. “And what if I did do that? What would happen to our…friendship if I took away your Control?”
“Well then it wouldn’t be fun anymore.”
“How terrible for you.” Katya drawled.
“How terrible for you,” Sombra pointed, almost touching Katya’s nose. “You’d be missing out. I’m a good friend to have, amiga. If you gave me a chance, there’s a lot more I could for you.”
“And when does it end?” Katya demanded. “When you get bored? When you have whatever it is you want from me? When the Siberian Omnium is ashes? How long do you plan to keep this noose tied around my neck?”
Sombra gestured her indifference. “I’ll keep playing for as long as you let yourself be tied, Ms. Volskaya. Until then…” She leaned towards her, not quite touching- but shrinking the space between them that Katya was surprised she didn’t didn’t feel Sombra’s breath on her face “…learn to enjoy not being in complete control, all the time.”
Something pressed against the small of her back- she jumped at the shock of it until she realized that she’d merely bumped into the back of the liquor cabinet. With her eyes locked on Sombra, she heard rather than saw her glass fall and hit the floor.
“Whoopsie,” Sombra looked down between them and chuckled. “Glad I don’t have to clean that up, either.”
They both turned to a light rapping on her door. Imrich’s muffled voice asked, “Ms. Volskaya? Ma’am?”
“I think that’s my cue.” Sombra said, not trying at all to be quiet.
“Leaving me with another mess to clean up,” Katya sighed at the slivers of glass floating in puddles of wasted brandy.
“Sorry-Not-Sorry. Maybe I’ll try to be here in-person, next time.”
Katya looked up sharply. “What-”
Sombra reached for her face, and for that second Katya’s breath stayed in her lungs until Sombra’s fingers brushed through her cheek, outline fizzing with static. “Dulces sueños.” She waved, her image losing resolution until it faded entirely.
She’d hacked her bedroom’s media projectors. That little-
Imrich called out louder through the door. “Ms. Voskaya, are you there?”
“Yes! I- yes, Imrich, I am here. I thought I had asked not to be disturbed.”
“I’m sorry ma’am, but your monitor alerted us that your heart rate had elevated.”
“Yes, I had-” She looked down at the floor. The spilled brandy was quickly filling the room with a strong, cloying smell like vanilla and varnish. “I had only dropped my drink. There’s some broken glass.”
“I will send for someone to come in and clean it,” he said.
“Thank you, Imrich.”
“Is everything else alright?”
Relaxing, Katya realized that her fist had been closed tightly. When she opened it, the holo of jostling purple code lit back to life. “Yes, Imrich. Everything’s under control.”