Spruance Del Curtin didn’t like the feeling of being in over his head. He’d only come down here because Brenda Redmond had asked him to, and he had an obligation to her.
But right now he was feeling very much like a fifth wheel. It wasn’t like he was any great whiz in IT Sure, he’d recognized the signs that most everyone down there was on the wrong track and growing more obsessively persistent about it — but once he’d made the necessary connections with people who would actually listen, he had been pretty much peripheral to the actual process of detecting, identifying and eliminating the malware that had infested the servers that managed Shepardsport’s connections with the outside universe.
And when Brenda had called him, she’d been thinking in terms of sorting out that garbled text Kitty Margrave had received from her friend dirtside. That was a puzzle that might have benefited from his connections with Dr. Doorne, who was an expert in signals processing, among other things.
But now that it had been followed by a very disturbing text that looked as if someone were trying very hard to convince everyone that nothing sinister was going on, he was pretty much surplus. However, until it got time that he actually needed to go somewhere, it would be hard for him to leave without looking like he was abandoning everyone.
However, from what he could hear of Betty Margrave’s conversation with Steffi Roderick down in IT, he might be getting a reprieve really soon. Soon they’d have someone up here who was pretty clearly a specialist in getting into other people’s systems without leaving obvious tracks, getting the information they needed, and getting back out without raising alarms. Then he could quietly excuse himself and head off to something that would nominally be something he was more adept at.
And then the door opened. “Hey, Sprue, what did you do to get sent down here this time?”
Sprue had to look up to see which of his clone-brothers had just arrived and was ribbing him. It would be Eli Mallory.
“So you’re the only hacker Steffi was able to scrounge up?” Not his best comeback, but better than nothing.
Betty Margrave looked up. “That’s enough, guys. If the two of you can’t manage to work together peaceably, figure out which one of you will leave.”
Which was the excuse Sprue needed to finally get out of here. “As it just happens, I need to get going if I’m going to get lunch before my air shift.”
Not as sharp as he would’ve liked it, but at least it got him out of here. Let Eli play hacker today. Sprue had other things to do.