by Jake Elwood
Cassie parked beside the hub, knowing she was visible to at least a couple of security or vehicle cameras. Those privacy laws were protecting her again. The cops wouldn't be able to subpoena any of the vid data unless a serious crime was committed. Even finding the splicer likely wouldn't be enough.
The hub was a low metal structure, barely knee-high, on the sidewalk against the wall of a grocery store. The whole thing was barely wider or deeper than the palm of her hand. It would be silently collecting data from PADs and terminals and AIs for blocks around, passing it on to other hubs, and distributing data back to those same PADs and terminals.
She stuck the splicer onto the side of the hub's metal casing, then hopped back in her car and drove around the block. By itself the splicer could read every scrap of data flowing into and out of the hub. It would all be a stream of incomprehensible, encrypted gibberish, though. Software was the other part of the equation. Expensive, barely-legal software that was discreetly shared around the galaxy by a shadowy ring of spies, detectives, professional snoops, and thieves like Cassie.
Her PAD showed a flashing icon that told her it was processing. Breaking encryption took time. Her old AI, Roger, would have chewed through it in seconds, but Roger was gone. Her PAD would still do the job.
Eventually.
Any sensitive or financial data flowing through the hub would have an extra layer of encryption, and she would probably not be able to break it in time. She was hoping for an ordinary call, as Smiling Charlie reacted to the police visit that had to be coming any minute now. Holcroft would be thorough and efficient. She doubted she'd have to wait long.
Cassie guessed that she had anywhere from a couple of hours to a full day for her splicer to pay off. Hubs weren't stupid. The primitive AI built into the data node would have detected her splicer by now and sent off a report. In a sensitive corporate or government network all data flow through that node would have frozen immediately, and an investigator would have arrived within minutes to see what was going on. This, however, was a distributed civilian network where false positives could be triggered by a thousand consumer devices. The response would be much slower, and data flow would continue as normal in the meantime.
She hoped.
Her PAD chimed. The slicing program had identified the AI at the King's Head, which would be acting as a smaller hub. The program would now focus its efforts on decrypting everything going in or out of the bar, and ignore all other traffic.
Now all she could do was wait.
She was thinking about sending an anonymous tip to Holcroft when the PAD's speakers made the sound of a man clearing his throat. She was intercepting a call.
A woman said, "Well?"
A man, it had to be Smiling Charlie, said, "The whole damn op lost atmo. Total implosion."
"How bad?" She had the crisp, disapproving voice of a bitter schoolteacher.
"They crated up one of my boys and one of yours. I don't know about your boy, but mine told the cops everything." He swore, with feeling. "I'm never giving that little shit another cred."
"You have to stop hiring the roaches who drink in your awful bar," the woman said. "They're not reliable."
"That was your idea. They don't know nothing, you said. Can't say nothing when they're caught. But they know me." He let out a gusty sigh. "Bluebottles gave me a right good grilling."
Bluebottles, Carrie thought. That's one I haven't heard before.
"The woman?"
"I don't think they even saw her," Charlie said. "Cops came swooping in about two hours ago. Grabbed 'em while they were staking out the house."
"Well, forget her," the woman said. "She's not the one who matters. It's this O'Malley."
"I don't have too many contacts in Kingstown," Charlie said. "I could ask around."
"No. Enough larking about. You sit tight. I'm going to have a professional deal with Mr. O'Malley."
"Yeah?" Charlie sounded sulky. "The twins?"
"The Nightingale," the woman said. "She had a shot at him once before. She's been pestering me for a second chance."
"She's a cold one," Charlie said. "I'm just as glad to be shut of it."
"See to it that you remain shut of it," the woman told him, her voice hardening. "The Nightingale is going to need to lie low after the O'Malley job. You don't want me sending her to Zemlya City."
"Now, hang on!" Charlie didn't sound as if he was smiling now. "You don't think I'm stupid enough to talk to the bluebottles! They've got nothing on me and they know it."
"They'll be watching you," the woman said. "Don't call me again." And the call ended.
"Nightingale," Cassie said into the sudden silence. "Who the hell is the Nightingale?" She tapped the PAD and connected to the AI running the local airport. "What have you gotten yourself into, Jerry?"
A chime alerted her to an incoming call. It was Holcroft. Cassie connected.
"Morren. What's happening?"
"Hello, Cassie. Well, we interrogated the two mugs from in front of your house. We've got some leads on the third one. We expect to pick him up soon."
Not likely, Cassie thought, but kept her mouth shut.
"One of them is a local petty crook. Hired muscle. The other one is the same kind of character, but he's from out of town. Some lowlife in a local bar hired them to kidnap you. We're following up. I'm sure we'll know more soon."
"Thank you," she said. "I feel safer knowing that you're involved."
"Don't blow oxygen in my vents," he said drily. "Where are you? At the safehouse?"
"Not at the moment," she said. "I don't feel safe in Zemlya City anymore. These people could be anywhere."
"I'll make sure you're safe."
"I know," she told him. "But then you can't concentrate on finding out who these people are. So I've decided to leave town for a few days. Lark is on a field trip. I'm going to check in on her, make sure she's all right. And get a change of scenery until this all is settled."
"All right," he said, his voice guarded. "Where are you going?"
"Aristotle Plateau," she said. "There are things I need to do in Kingstown."
Episode 3 - Spyders
Chapter 9
She might never have spotted the surveillance if the lecture hadn't been so boring.
Lark stood in the ballroom of the Iskander Hotel, trying not to fidget, listening to an earnest man in an old-fashioned suit drone on and on about things that had happened ten years before she was born. She supposed it was interesting in an abstract sort of way – extremists had tried to murder a high-ranking Skyland minister right here in this very room – but the man's delivery style sucked every bit of excitement out of the story.
He was old. Old enough to remember when it all happened, and his eyes lit up beneath the snowy overhang of his eyebrows when he talked about hearing the news. Instead of telling the students about the legendary Hiram Hearne, and how the police had hounded him up the stairs and cornered him on the roof in a desperate shootout before his daring escape, the old man recited the details of where he himself had been on that fateful day, a mere four hundred and fifteen kilometers away, eating a special dinner of glazed ham with fresh vegetables with his mother and his aunt Beatrice in honor of his uncle Fitz's birthday.
She let the man's voice wash over her, kept her face pointed politely in his general direction, and looked at the wall behind him. A row of high windows gave her a view of the rooftops behind. Why had the shooter barged in here, with armed bodyguards all over the place? Why not hide on a rooftop with a laser rifle?
Well, Skyland security might have been watching for that. After all, tensions between Skyland and the groundsiders had been high for generations. Besides, Hearne was a show-off. A ham. He had to do things the flashy, dramatic way, Lark thought. Which was stupid. The minister from Skyland had hit the floor, covered by bodyguards, completely unhurt, while Hearne fled in terror with laser burns all over his body.
Lark scanned the room, thinking about how she would have done
it. Hearne had shoved his way past the guards at the door. The alarm had gone up before he even saw the minister. His mission had been doomed from the start.
Better to hide inside and wait for the minister to arrive. Hearne could have popped up from behind the bar or something and shot the minister before anyone even knew he was there. Lark shivered as she imagined it. She wouldn't want to be an assassin, she decided. A thief's life was much less gruesome. But if she was going to be an assassin, she'd be a good one.
Where to hide? That was the question. If it was her, she decided, she'd send in a spy-bot first to scan the room. Not just this room, either. The rooms on either side, and the floors above and below. Security might check out the ballroom pretty thoroughly, but what if Hearne had rented a room one floor up? She imagined the ceiling exploding in a shower of plaster and the assassin dropping through, shooting his target, then using an antigrav harness to pop back up through the hole.
She thought of the spy camera she'd put on the cleaning machine at the opera house. Would that work here? It would be better to have a self-guided spyder, one that could crawl from room to room and up and down stairs.
The floor would be challenging. It was tiled in white stone, and a spyder could be seen, stepped on, or swept up by a cleaning machine. There were flying spyders, but they were prohibitively expensive and actually less secure than the crawling kind. A crawling spyder could spot electronic sweeps and shut itself down, lying inert for a time until the sweep was done. A flying spyder couldn't do that without crashing.
Lark switched her gaze to the walls. A molding ran along, just above head-height on an adult, all the way around the room except where windows got in the way. She imagined a spyder scuttling along the top of the molding, practically invisible and safe from harm.
How would it get from room to room, though? She frowned. This spy stuff was harder than she'd realized. Still, she knew how to rise to a challenge. A very good spyder could cling upside-down to a smooth, flat surface. Such a spyder might hide right above the doorway, waiting for the right moment, then crawl down, traverse the underside of the lintel, and reach the next room.
Surreptitiously she brought up her PAD, aimed the camera at the moulding just above the doorway, and zoomed in.
She gasped out loud. Dozens of reflective eyes peered back at her, tiny spyders all in a row.
"Yes, it's startling," the old man said, beaming at her. "I still can't believe he escaped. And Hearne is out there to this day, hiding out, no doubt plotting his revenge. Everyone says he'll try to rescue Jacob, and that's when he'll finally be caught."
Jacob? Lark frowned, replaying the lecture in her memory. Some corner of her mind had listened to the old buzzard as be blathered away. Jacob Hearne, Hiram's son, who had tried to fill his father's rather large boots and failed. Currently awaiting execution in Skyland for trying to blow up a passenger shuttle full of tourists. Most of the would-be victims had been settlers like Jacob, not the Skylanders he hated so much.
So much for his quest to become a folk hero.
"Next we're going to see the music room. The curtains were made based on a pattern that dates back to Earth, almost before space flight! Come this way, children …."
Lark trailed along behind him, enduring a mocking smirk from Elly Doctorson and a suspicious glare from Miss Grimsby. Steeling herself not to look at the spyders, Lark followed the class out of the ballroom and into a wide, elegant hallway. When everyone was in the corridor she glanced back, and caught a hint of movement at the top of the doorframe.
The spyders were following.
Cold tingles chased themselves back and forth across her skin. What in space was going on? Could someone actually be planning an assassination? Maybe of the Skyland princess who was landing sometime today?
But surely there were too many spyders. One mini robot was much harder to spot than a dozen. Why so many?
And why were they following a bunch of schoolchildren?
For an awful couple of minutes she was sure it was her father's minions. He was dead, she'd seen his body, but he had legions of employees, and they could still be hunting her. Her mind leaped from one awful possibility to another. There'd been a bounty on Lark, less than a year ago. Maybe the spyders were a tool of bounty hunters. They could be surrounding the hotel even now.
An image of her life a year before filled her mind. She'd been living a nightmare, beaten regularly by her father for no particular reason. The man seemed to have boundless reserves of rage, and Lark was an easy target when he needed to vent. She'd lived with fear for so long she'd forgotten what it felt like not to be afraid.
Cassie, her protector and savior, was half a world away. Even if Lark called right now, she could be stunned and cuffed and in the hold of a ship before Cassie was half way to Kingstown.
"Lark. Lark! What's the matter? Are you ill?"
Lark shook her head, feeling the worst of the terror drain away, and looked up at Miss Grimsby. The woman looked distinctly worried, and Lark stared at her, still caught up in the horrors of the past. She looks funny. What do I look like?
"Your face is white," Miss Grimsby said, as if she'd heard Lark's question. "Do you feel faint?"
Lark shivered. My father is dead. I saw his body. He can't hurt me. Not ever again. She could feel the paralyzing terror easing. It was a long time ago. Months and months. I'm safe now. He can't ever touch me again.
Her mind flashed back to the apartment on Hesperus where he'd terrorized her for so long, and it occurred to her that someone else must live there now. Escaping from that apartment had become the pivotal moment of her life, and now it was the home of strangers. Somehow that thought had never occurred to her before, and she felt a strange shift in her perspective. No one can take me back there. Dad's not there anymore. It's not even his apartment now. I can't go back. No one can ever make me go back.
"Lark?" Miss Grimsby's voice rose as she moved from concern to outright alarm.
"I'm all right, Miss Grimsby," Lark assured her. Her voice sounded hoarse, and she cleared her throat. "I'm okay now."
"Do you need a glass of water? Something to eat? Is your blood sugar low?"
Lark was aware of the other students watching her curiously. Beyond them she could see the walls and the ceiling, with no spyders in sight right at the moment. If the spyders were following Lark specifically, she decided, she needed to know it. And if she could find out where they came from, so much the better.
"Actually, I want to wash my face. I think that would help. I'll be right back." Giving the teacher her most reassuring smile, Lark turned and headed for a narrow side corridor where she could make out the symbol for a washroom. She heard Miss Grimsby take an uncertain step behind her, starting to follow, but there were more than a dozen other students, none of them any better behaved than they had to be. Miss Grimsby's footsteps faltered and stopped.
The washroom door slid open with a quiet hiss. Lark grimaced at her face in the mirror. She looked pale and bloodless, her lips strangely dark against the pallor of her skin. No wonder Miss Grimsby was alarmed.
"I'm not going back to Hesperus," she told her reflection. "That part of my life is over. Forever."
Her reflection responded by improving a bit in color. Lark gave the reflected girl a firm nod, got a matching nod in reply, and splashed cold water into her face. That helped her color even more. She looked almost normal now.
No spyders had followed her into the washroom. That made sense, she supposed. She couldn't go anywhere or get up to anything. She would have to do something much more suspicious if she wanted to draw them out.
The washroom door slid open as she approached. The broad corridor and the waiting students were to the right. Lark went left, deeper down the narrow hallway, listening for the click of tiny feet on the ceiling above. She heard nothing, of course. Spyders were nearly as silent as real spiders. She reached an alcove with a sink, a floor drain, and a rack of little maintenance robots. Doing her best to look furtive
, she peered over her shoulder, then darted into the alcove.
The air smelled of antiseptic and mud, with a hint of machine oil coming from the rack of small machines. Lark looked around, seeking inspiration. How to get a spyder off the ceiling? She scanned the alcove, considered trying to throw one of the little floor sweepers, and rejected the idea. A box of disposable cloth pads caught her eye. Designed for the bottom of the floor-polisher, the pads were twice the size of her palm, thin and flexible. They were absorbent, too, she discovered as she ran several of them under the tap in the sink.
She was just in time. She turned the tap off, looked up, and saw a tiny black dot moving across the ceiling. She threw the wet pad, the spyder dodged deeper into the alcove, and she threw again. And pumped her fist in the air as she scored a direct hit.
The first pad stuck to the ceiling for a moment, then peeled loose and fell to the floor. Lark stood under the second pad, waiting patiently. The edges started to peel away, dripping water onto the floor.
"Lark?" The washroom door hissed open, and Lark muttered a bad word under her breath. She was out of time. "Lark, where are— "The washroom door closed, cutting off Miss Grimsby's voice.
The second pad dropped, landing with a wet plop and splashing Lark's shoes with water. The spyder, a dark shape a couple of millimeters wide with hair-thick legs jutting out on every side, struggled feebly in the wet cloth. Lark plucked the tiny machine out of the pad and slid it into her shirt pocket, then pressed a hand over the pocket to keep the little machine from crawling out. The sealing strip reacted to the pressure and sealed her pocket.
The washroom door hissed open. "Lark, where are you?"
"Here, Miss Grimsby." Lark trotted out of the alcove. She felt bad leaving a mess, but it was a janitorial closet, after all. The machines would have to move less than a meter to clean it all up. "I got confused when I came out of the washroom. Is it that way?" She pointed toward the main corridor, smiled, and breezed past the indignant teacher. "Come on, Miss Grimsby, they'll leave us behind!"
