by Carl Sargent
Kristen was carrying the heavy knife she'd brought from Manoj's place, not an item she would normally touch in Cape Town itself, where she could get two years just for its presence in her bag. Right here, right now, though, she was glad to have it. All the way to the villa, set back off Main Street by a fringe of security railings and heavy flowering bushes, she got more and more paranoid. By the time she rang the bell at the plain gray gates, she was desperate to be off the street. The gates swung slowly open just long enough to allow her admittance, then immediately snapped shut behind her.
Then she walked up to the front door which was opened by a lean, gaunt-faced white man holding a heavy pistol leveled at her chest.
"Drop the bag and put your hands on your head," he ordered. She complied at once. Keeping the gun, and his eyes, trained on her, the man sank down onto one knee to open the bag. He pulled out her knife, spat at her, and kept it in one hand as he told her to retrieve the bag. She did so very slowly.
"Thought you'd cut me up for the goods, huh?" he snarled at her.
"Look, chummer, I'm just the errand girl," she said wearily. "I walked down Main Street to get here. What kind of idiot would do that without a blade?"
He nodded reluctantly and edged back into the hallway. "You better come in. I ain't going to just pull everything out in plain view of anyone keeping their eyes open," he said. Sighing, she followed him in, being careful to move slowly and deliberately.
The man put the knife down on the table and, keeping his eyes on her, walked over to a desk and picked up an old, crudely made radio. Carrying it over to her, he stuffed it into her bag.
"It's in there," he said. "Tell Manoj he can keep the radio. It still works." For a moment he almost allowed himself a smile and then thought better of it. "Tell him the other half of the money had better be here by tomorrow morning or he's going to get a visit from some men. Now, buzz."
Kristen wasn't yet ready to abandon the chance to make some extra money. "I've got something Manoj said you might want to buy." The man laughed derisively, but that didn't put her off. "In the bag. A computer."
He extracted the radio again and put it to one side, then removed the small box. The fact that he didn't stare at it like it was something that had just crawled into a hole and died was promising.
"Let me scope it," he said. "But you'd better come with me. I ain't trusting you to sit in here."
Still watching her like a veldt hawk, he led her into the back room, where he told her to sit opposite him at a work table. He laid the gun down within reach and flicked the tiny power button on the computer.
"Manoj couldn't get it to work. He said maybe you could use the parts," Kristen told him. He unscrewed the casing and checked the insides.
"Nothing really wrong with it. I could use some of this, maybe," he said coolly. "Give you a hundred rand for it."
That was chicken fodder, really. But even though she didn't know what the little machine was worth, Kristen wasn't in much of a bargaining position. She'd learned that a small gain now was better than the possibility of a big gain later, so she decided to take the money.
"Sure. If you help me with one thing."
"Huh?" he grunted. She pushed the unfurled printout at
him. "One of the names on this list. Serrin Shamandar. Any way of getting more information?"
He looked at the digits on the paper. "There's a telecom number," he said. "Why ain't you tried it, stupid?"
"I can't read, stupid," she snapped, stung.
"Look, I'm not making any calls to someone I never even heard of," he said. "Some people have permanent traces that switch on as soon as you call 'em. If you want to talk to this bugger, get someone to make the call for you when you get back home. Use a public phone."
If I can find one that hasn't been fragged, she thought. The only ones still working were in parts of town where Kristen's dark skin would be out of place and make her look as suspicious as hell.
"Look, it's only a phone call," she said miserably. "He's not going to come looking for you all the way from Seattle just because somebody calls him from Cape Town, is he? Twenty bucks I can pay you."
"Where did you get dollars? No, I won't ask," he said drily. "All right. You get half a minute, that's all."
He entered the code on his telecom, cutting the visual channel. The whine that came back left him grinning.
"That's no phone number, gal. It's a fax. Words only. You want me to type in a message? Cost you ten bucks a half-minute."
Kristen didn't want him to know what she was going to say. She didn't even know what she wanted to say. She tried to think of someone she'd trust enough to do it back in Cape Town. She got up to leave, but he leveled the gun at her.
"Twenty bucks, you said."
She threw him half of that. "You made the connection, but I didn't get to talk. Half rate," she said, staring defiantly at him. He sniffed and looked away from her.
"Have it your way. Take your knife and get back in one piece. Manoj will be really slotted off if you don't make it." He unrolled a couple of fifties from his pocket and exchanged them for the fives on the table.
By the time the gates had closed behind her and she'd run the gauntlet of eyes along the highway again, Kristen
wasn't looking forward to the bus trip home. She was carrying a five-to-ten sentence in her bag and was ten dollars poorer for nothing. Even with a hundred rand, by the time she'd bought a drink to survive the ride home she'd have spent almost as much as she was supposed to get paid for this trip. Kristen sighed. Well, that was the thing about luck. Sometimes a run of it ended just too soon.
"Lunch time, you chaps," came an infuriatingly cheerful voice. "You've had three hours' kip. Sleep any longer and you won't sleep tonight. Come on, you missed the food by time it got here."
Serrin opened his eyes and yawned. Rolling off the bed, he went burrowing into his case for his toothbrush. He was just heading for the bathroom while the troll snored thunderously on when Michael stopped him in his tracks.
"Well, it's not the Damascus League who's after you," the Englishman told him. "German info is that they wanted to scrag Small because he's cuddling up too close to the Jewish vote. They've got a list of targets, but you're not on it. You will also be pleased to know that Renraku, Aztechnology, HKB in London who, I gather, have a special interest in you and a handful of other power-players might be keeping tabs on you, but with little in the way of homicidal intent."
"You mean you've cracked the surveillance files of Renraku? Aztechnology? Are you for real?" Serrin gasped.
"Of course not. I have a few contacts, that's all. Asking them to confirm that you're not on anything above zero-priority level isn't calling in such a high-level favor. By the way, Frieda in Frankfurt remembers a completely anonymous man in a chauffeur's uniform. Average height, average build, shades, peaked cap. long coat. No identifying characteristics whatsoever. She said he had a sexy voice, though."
"Great," Serrin grumbled. "Next time some drekhead tries to shoot me I'll remember to notice that."
"So we've established some negatives. Now Tracey's
doing her stuff on missing mages. Separated by race and tagged for corporate politics, obviously. She's doing the easy stuff now, but I think I'll jump into the pool and do the difficult ones myself while you're having lunch. I wouldn't want to leave her to the mercies of British 1C, for instance. Digging into the heavier corporates for unre-ported losses might be tricky, too."
"Don't you ever sleep?" Serrin wondered.
"I don't need more than three hours a night. Not since I started meditating twice a day. Ten minutes of that is as good as two hours sleep, believe me. I've got an overac-tive dopaminergic circuit, Geraint tells me. He once made me pee into some flask for one of his bloody experiments to test for some metabolites or other when we were at Cambridge. He did chromatography and assays on it and told me that, depending on how I handled it, I'd be either one of the best deckers in the business or a schizophrenic."
Serrin looked at Michael long and hard. "You're a freak," he said finally.
"Yup," Michael smiled happily. "Most people say that to me inside an hour of meeting me. You're very polite for a sep. Got any English blood in you?"
The elf shook his head and made for the shower. By the time he'd emerged from it, shaved and bathed and happier with life, he heard Michael and Tom in earnest conversation.
"No, you're wrong," Michael was saying animately. "We need a hell of a lot less emotion in people. The better educated, more intelligent, more analytical people are, the better they can see the bulldrek all around them and start thinking about it."
"You don't need to think to know that some things are wrong," the troll said simply. "It's something you've got to feel. If you don't feel, you ain't got any sense of right and wrong."
"Sure, but " Michael broke off as Serrin wandered back into view.
The Englishman looked faintly sheepish. "Sorry, old boy. I'll get back to the grindstone. I've been having a fascinating discussion with Tom." He got up from the table and headed for the second work room, fingering the datajack on his temple. "Excuse me. As we Brits are prone to say, I may be gone some time." He closed the door behind him.
"He's weird," sighed the elf.
"Are all these British like that?" the troll asked.
Serrin laughed. "Not entirely. Not all the time. But he's good at his work. He's doing what we need."
The troll grunted and made some comment about lunch.
"We could raid the freezer, or we could head for somewhere in town. I'm a bit paranoid about going out. We'd be safer here."
"I need the fresh air," Tom complained. "Anyway, I've seen his fridge. He only eats food without anything in it. It's all skimmed this and no-calorie that. A troll could die of starvation up here."
"Well, I guess nobody would recognize me in those ridiculous clothes," Serrin sighed. "I'll keep checking astrally too. I've already been doing that."
"I noticed," the troll said.
"I think I remember seeing someplace where you can get all the pizza and pasta you want for ten bucks, even if you're a troll. As long as you're with someone who isn't. That way, twenty covers you and the other guy," the elf said.
"If you've got your Predator, I've got my Room-sweeper," the troll sniffed. "I got an empty belly too. Now, where is this place?"
9
The alert from Tracey surprised him. Most of the frame-decking had been pretty simple, but this time Michael was getting a message that the Zulu Nation system he'd tried to get into was an expert system. That spelled danger. The only reason he'd checked it was because a flight from New Hlobane had arrived in JFK fifteen minutes before Serrin had fled for Frankfurt. Which intrigued him. The schedule for European and Japanese flights was exactly what he'd expected to find, but a direct flight from the Zulu capital into New York's JFK was not. That startling fact stood out like a grain of grit in vaseline. Now the frame was telling him these Zulus had some serious design work in their police systems.
Serrin and Tom were still out, so he rigged himself up with a cardiomonitor and respiratory analyzer and jacked in. Appearing in the virtual reality of the Matrix as a professor, complete with gown and mortar board, he gripped the violin case that carried his machine-gun attack utility and headed out the long route of datalines across the Atlantic.
The frame had already ferreted out the SAN number for the Zulu system, so he knew where to go. What he didn't know was whether there was any system alert; Tracey would have disengaged before finding out. He switched to evasion mode, minimizing his chances of being detected until he could determine whether any alarm programs had been triggered.
The system access node appeared to him as a circle of grassland hemmed in by broad-leaved, thick-barked trees swaying slightly in some unknown breeze. The sleeping lioness wasn't a surprise, though he didn't like her proximity to the rope bridge across the stream in the distance. Even more worrisome was the vulture sitting peacefully in one of the trees. He had no way of even guessing what kind of construct it might be.
Inching forward he felt the familiar tug at his senses. This was a sculpted system, of course, custom-designed and much more difficult to maneuver than a system using standard icon imagery. He assumed that it wouldn't be too difficult to force this system to accept his persona, the icon by which he existed in this illusory electron world, but that vulture seemed ominous. Not because of what it was doing, but precisely because it wasn't doing anything. Scanner program, he guessed, but he wanted to be sure.
What it turned out to be was a lot worse than that.
He let fly the little bird of prey, the hawk that was his analyze program, to circle above the vulture while he stayed where he was, keeping an eye on the lioness. The analyzing hawk came back with some conflicting signals. Trying to make sense of it, he concentrated on seeing through the hawk's eyes.
The wings of the vulture showed a bizarre patterning, each feather with a pattern halfway between a simple spiral and a feathered fractal. Its eyes scanned everything at an impossible speed, not so much flitting around as zooming.
He had to admit it was wiz: an infinite-regress element. It was, of course, a detection program, and was entirely self-referencing. In a sculpted system, the damn thing knew exactly what was allowed in here and what wasn't. If he tried to overcome the reality of this system, it was going to squawk. If he tried to defeat it, it had an infinitely self-checking algorithm that would actually respond to its defeat. And if he tried to defeat the algorithm amp; Michael got dizzy just thinking about the possibilities.
And this was just at the entrance to the system? What else did these cobbers have in here? He allowed his persona to change, accepting the slight disorientation that would bring. Now appearing in the form of a tall, spear-bearing Zulu, he strode forward to the bridge, and
switched to bod mode. In a system like this, any specialized mode of operation left too many relative weaknesses for his liking.
He took a chance on a smoke program, needing to quickly defeat the defenses of this first node. That would penalize him too, but Michael had enough confidence in his own skills not to worry overmuch. A swarm of noisy parrots filled the scene just as the lioness awoke and opened her throat to growl. Frag it, he thought, I took her for killer 1C, but it's another detection program. Surely?
Michael quit the attack program and engaged a sleaze instead. Instead of the infinitely unfolding plastic wallet of passes and permits and wads of bills, which was the program's usual image, his spear became a tribal charm, an intricate gold and silver design wholly unfamiliar to him. The lioness looked at it and yawned, a rippling growl coming from deep in her throat. Sweating a little, he edged past her toward the bridge.
That bridge has got to be barrier 1C, he thought. And he had the horrible feeling that it was probably pretty active most of the time. Try to cross that bridge and he'd find himself surrounded by killer giraffes or something. He brought the hawk to him to check it out.
The bird set one foot uncertainly on the bridge. Now that he knew it was barrier, Michael engaged the sleaze program again to get past it undetected. Neatly, the spear changed again into a snake, undulating its way across the bridge, its body touching only alternate wooden planks. Carefully taking the same route, the warrior icon followed it.
The jungle clearing beyond was standard fare, as were the tunnel-like pathways cut through the thick vegetation beyond that. This was the SPU, and down those pathways were the dataline junctions, he figured. The hawk told him there was nothing in the SPU itself; the clearing was empty.
He called up Tracey and sent her down one dataline while he trod carefully along another. He was risking sensor mode now, needing to check the databanks at the end of the passages for information on missing persons. There was, of course, a fair chance that what he was after would
be much further along in the system, but it was a chance he had to take. It depended on how the system was organized. The worst c
ase was that the sensitive entries had been deleted entirely from the missing persons file and relocated elsewhere in far more heavily defended databases. No matter. His analyze programs could detect any trace of a deletion from way back, and if that was how they'd arranged things, taking lessons from the Israelis, he'd know about it.
He got lucky. The oranges in the citrus grove were what he was after. He recalled the frame and switched back to bod mode again, minimizing the risk. There, wallowing peacefully in a pool beside the orange trees was a very, very large hippo.
What the frag is that? he wondered. Tracey, appearing as a warrior like himself, opened her bag and released the browser program. The octopus-like creature floated happily in mid-air and began testing fruits with its avalanche of tentacles, picking off what it needed and flinging them into the bag.
A split-second before it happened Michael knew something was wrong. Watching the hippo had been a mistake; it was only a decoy. The ground behind him turned into a swamp as a tar pit program activated; in the meantime a multitude of thin black serpents sped toward him at an unbelievable rate through the swaying grass.
His reaction speed hit Mach 2. Black mambas, huh. Fastest thing without legs and poisonous as hell. Black 1C. If he jacked out now, he'd lose everything and would never get back in. He'd faced this one before. That was why he'd slapped those monitors onto his body.
Adrenaline never raced through him like it did on these rare occasions. Michael knew he didn't have long before he would be automatically disconnected by his own deck. He whirled his spear around in a circle just above ground level, hanging tough. There were hundreds of the fraggers and he could feel his core body temperature spiking as his heart began to pound wildly. The frame was already executing a sensor-triggered withdrawal when the shock hammered through him and he was flung bodily across the room, the ripped-out wires quivering over the side of
the table. Michael twitched in delicate spasms for a moment, then lay still.
"Hey, Manoj, you got to do this for me. I nearly got boxed down there, chummer. There were skollies all over the streets. You sent me into a bad place, man. That number is only to make a call to a fax, whatever that is!"
