The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) by Erik Hanberg Read Free Book Online

they continued to find dead ends. All the normal techniques for finding collaborators weren’t working.
    Research on the hovercraft was disconcerting, too. Normally, raiders used army surplus or built a drone from scrap. But this hovercraft was professional and state-of-the-art. From their ship to their communications, this was a new kind of raider.
    He went back inside and cleaned his plate. He was so lost in thought that he forgot the drawer was open next to him and bumped into it, causing the plate in his hand to drop and shatter.
    “Damn it,” he muttered. Shaw had lost count of how many different designer table settings Ellie had bought. He remembered that this one came from a special limited edition set that she’d licensed from some New York designer that she loved. Shaw went for a broom in the other room. He swept up the shards of china and threw them into the recycle bin. In the office Shaw found the printer on standby. The wrap on his forearm had already reported the broken plate to the designer and ordered the printer to create a replacement.
    Normally, printing at home was free, save for the cost of the material. Ellie loved high-end designers, though, which meant license fees to print plates at home. Their license for this set was for eight printed plates. If the designer wanted to make sure Shaw really had broken a plate, and that they only had eight printed, she could always jump in to the apartment and check.
    Shaw pressed a button and the printer went to work. Within a minute it had reprinted the piece of china. As long as it could fit inside the half-meter cube, and could be made from some combination of aluminum, plastic, rubber, compressed sawdust, crystal, porcelain, or glass, Shaw could order it and print it at home.
    The only thing lacking, Shaw felt, was true wood. The fake grain that covered the compressed sawdust was mostly convincing until you ran your fingers over it. The texture was just wrong. To buy anything made of true wood meant shipping costs, or actually going out to a commons to buy it. And when you could print a reasonable facsimile of it at home—what was the point of going through all that trouble?
    Shaw took the reprinted plate back into the kitchen and replaced it in the cabinet.
    He washed his hands and grabbed his wrap from the kitchen table, where it was lying flat. As he curled the soft screen around his forearm, the jump reports he’d been reading automatically reformatted so that whether he was looking at the outside or inside of his arm, he could easily read the text. He went back into the small office—the only room in the apartment where they had space for a jump box.
    A light flashed green on the box, recognizing Shaw’s wrap approaching, and then stayed illuminated, recognizing his intent to use the box. It logged Shaw into the military servers at the Lattice for faster use. Since there weren’t any secrets anymore, it was more about convenience than it was about security. The report from the initial investigative jumpers yesterday, complete with bookmarks in the Lattice, were loaded into his personal jump box.
    Sliding inside it, he looked up at the welcome screen that was just barely a foot above his nose. The welcome faded and the list of tags from the jump report replaced it. Shaw went to open the first one and then hesitated. Everyone would expect him to go through the tags to get caught up to speed. In fact, these tags would serve as the key connection to everyone who wanted to learn more about this raid. Why bother finding your own tags, when these were already assembled?
    The raiders had already used the natural routine of Lattice security to their advantage—first with Yang’s double and again with the lasers. If Shaw had a chance at beating these raiders, he needed to confound their expectations, not fit into their patterns. Shaw pushed aside the jump tags.
    One of the reasons he was using the box instead of his ring was the greater ability for manual