Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 99

fired, turning the whole thing around, telling the world
that the real danger was in overzealous investigation
of the crimes, that the real terrorists were in Washington, London and Moscow, and the whole thing was
the inevitable consequence of trying to stop terrorist
activity in the first place, and blah, blah, blah, fucking
blah. The usual shit.

100 miles from Bullhead City. The cameras on the
Interstate verified that some off-road trucks had passed
it and the locals helped narrow the search down until
we realised that they hadn’t just vanished, as we’d
thought. The clever little bastards had almost certainly, they simply must have, well, gone to ground in an
automated data centre.

Well, screw that, we thought. We were gonna find
those bastards and nail their asses to the wall - and we
were going to do it right. Nobody was going to be able
to complain about their human rights being violated
or make out we’d mistreated anyone or been naughty
or bad or “overzealous” and get them off this time. No
way. No how.

ADCs are a great place to hide - in theory. Internet
companies use ‘em to house server farms and backups,
they like desert locations ‘cause there’s plenty of solar
power and it’s far away from anything that’s ever likely to be attacked, as well as most of the people liable
to do the attacking. They’re pretty