Sola flipped her gun around and handed it safely to one of her boyfriends, Aarav. She and Kennedy were Ruby’s best friends. The women approached Ruby, and Liam reluctantly loosened his arms so she could slip into the seat next to him instead of remaining curled up on his lap.
Ruby hugged Kennedy and Sola even as their medic murmured a few questions to ensure she was stable before they proceeded. It was progress.
But not enough.
“We can’t really protect you. Not fully. Can we?” Ace swallowed hard and glanced at the floor. His self-esteem had taken a bigger beating than his arm when he’d been injured, and now this…right when he was about to turn things around and make his comeback.
Ruby wasn’t about to lie, though. She winced and shook her head. “Not from…this.”
“Whatexactlyare we talking about?” Jordan asked again, less intensely this time.
“How much do you know about crypto?” Ruby wondered.
“I hear people talk about how it’s bad for the environment and uses a lot of energy,” Tavish responded. “Is that true?”
“Kind of. Some cryptocurrencies rely on proof of work to validate new additions to the blockchain. Basically that’s a race between tons of computers to solve a problem and then tell all the other computers the solution in order to prove they did the work to find the answer. As a prize, that computer’s owner gets to write the next block in the chain, which contains details about a transaction, and gets rewarded with a hefty fee. That’s how things started out, anyway.
“Some of us who deal with first-generation systems buy carbon offsets to decrease the environmental impact of using so much energy and will keep doing so until that approach is entirely phased out. The future of this technology is to use staking instead. Which means, in the simplest of terms, that instead of trying to win a computer race, you’re putting up some of your own money in order to volunteer to write the next block. If you were a bad actor, then you could get your stake taken away, so you have incentive to play by the rules. When we do it this way, as most systems are evolving to, there is far less energy usage. But in all cases, for blockchain to sustain itself, users have to have trust in the system, which is what these processes ensure.”
“And something broke that process tonight?” Jordan’s eyes narrowed as he started to catch on.
“Yes, exactly.” Ruby grew more animated, her teary eyes wide and her hands flying as she nerdified them all, just a little. “Blockchain technology is a decentralized form of record keeping. It cuts out the middleman like banks or lawyers or people who traditionally held power because they maintained systems and had the final say, for example, on who owned what. Blocks are really simply ledger entries, like in accounting. It’s a way to edit information like current bank balances or ownership of land without changing the historical record, which everyone can view. Theoretically, you should need control of fifty-one percent of the resources mining or staking in order to change the blockchain. On the scale we’re talking about, no one person could achieve that without spending more than it would be worth to do so, so it’s safe for everyone.”
Jordan mulled that over while Ace’s head started aching with his attempt to keep up. How the hell did someone think of all that in the first place? Their boss finally tapped his temple as what she was telling them sank in. “So you’re saying you witnessed someone edit an existing block in the chain.”
“It’s impossible…but yes. I swear I did. And I have proof saved to our network, although I took it offline temporarily to keep it safe from the hackers.” Ruby sighed. Her forehead scrunched and she shook her head, glancing up and away as if rewatching those screens in her memory. “I was poking around to see if there was any dirt on the founders of an obscure coin not worth shit, one nobody will likely realize is being tampered with either. What I saw tells me whoever these assholes are…they’re testing some kind of virus that tricks the system into giving them a false majority and then hides their tracks. And it’s working. They could write themselves into billions of dollars if they attacked a major currency like Bitcoin or Ethereum.”
“Or take someone else’s money…” Ace glared. He hadn’t forgotten they’d robbed her too.
Ruby winced. “That’s a separate issue. They’re good. Really good. My wallet should have been secure without my key. But I verified and they weren’t bluffing. It’s empty.”
“How much are we talking here?” Jordan asked. “What did they steal from you?”
“Around five million.” Ruby’s shoulders slumped.
Ace froze. “Five million coin thingies, right?”
Surely one of them wasn’t that valuable. Maybe that only added up to like fifty cents, though the flush rising up her cheeks was telling him otherwise.
“No,dollars.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Fortunately, what they assumed was my life savings was only one of my crypto wallets. But still. Fuck them.”
“Hold on.” Liam looked over at Ace as if to confirm he’d heard correctly. “You’re telling us you’re loaded? Even aside from the ridiculous salary Jordan pays us all?”
Ruby shrugged. “Five million bucks less loaded than this morning, but I don’t work here for the money. I do it because it’s the right thing to do…and because it’s usually fun fucking with the bad guys. Jordan promised me he’d eventually let me do that more, covering my ass while I expanded our infosecurity services into some, ahem, gray-hat realms like tracking the distributors of ransomware, subverting people selling harvested data on the dark web, developing threat intelligence and stuff like that.”
Jordan beamed at her. “You do it so well. You’ve been there for us when we needed you to support our missions. I hope you know we’re here for you until this is resolved.”
Ruby relaxed then, leaning into Liam’s side and squeezing Sola’s hand. “Shields are the good guys, even if we sometimes do bad things.”
Ace had always known Ruby was a genius. But now he was sure of just how far beyond him she was. What the hell could someone like him have to offer her? These days it wasn’t even physical protection since he’d been out of commission. Still, he’d do his best to live up to the faith Jordan was placing in each of them. If he couldn’t defend her himself, he’d find out who could and convince them to come onboard.
As he usually did, Liam read his mind. He asked calmly, his voice never rising, despite the rage simmering in his gaze, “If we can’t help you, who can?”
“I need JRad.” Ruby squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her shaking fingers to her temples. She clearly despised asking for assistance and inconveniencing her friends as much as Ace had these past several months.
“Who’s that?” Liam wondered. No one else seemed to pick up on the thread of irritation or maybe jealousy in his roommate’s tone, but Ace knew the man better than anyone, maybe even than Liam knew himself.
“He’s my mentor.” Ruby swatted Liam’s rock-solid abs with the back of her hand. Apparently she could read him pretty well too. “Officially, he’s the head specialist for the OSPD cybercrimes department. But he has facets to him that are…unexpected.”