The Jennifer Morgue l-3

by Charles Stross

  The boot sequence is complete. It's amazing what you can cram into a memory stick these days: it loads a Linux kernel with some very heavily customized device drivers, looks around, scratches its head, spawns a virtual machine, and rolls right on to load the Media Center operating system on top. I hit the boss key to bring the Linux session front and center, then have a poke around. If anyone interrupts me, another tap on the boss key will bring the brain-dead TV back on-screen.

  I hunker down and take a look around the/proc file system to see what I've got my hands on. Yep, it definitely beats ductcrawling as a way of kicking black beret ass.

  It turns out that what I've got my hands on is annoyingly close to a stock Media Center PC. A Media Center PC is meant to look like a digital video recorder on steroids, able to play music and do stuff with your cable connection. So it's a fair bet that there's some sort of cable going into the back of the box, I reason. The box itself is pretty powerful — that is, it's roughly comparable to a ten-year-old super-computer or a five-year-old scientific workstation — and when it isn't spending half its energy scanning for viruses or painting a pretty drop-shadow under the mouse pointer it runs like greased whippet shit. But it doesn't have all the occult applications support I'm used to finding preloaded, and as a development box it sucks mud — if I hadn't brought my USB key I wouldn't even have a C compiler Having OwnZored the box, I go looking for network interfaces. First results aren't promising: there's a dedicated TV tuner card and a cable going into the back, but no wired Ethernet. But then I look again, and see the kernel's autoloaded an Orinoco driver. It hasn't come up by default, b u t ...

  Hah! Five minutes of poking around tells me what's going on here. This box probably came with an internal WiFi card, but it's not in use. The PC is simply being used as a television, hooked up to the ship's coaxial backbone, and nobody's even configured the Ethernet setup under Windows. Possibly they don't know about the network card? The Laundry-issue USB stick detected it straight off and started running AirSnort in promiscuous node, hunting for wireless traffic, but it hasn't found anything yet. After about thirty seconds I realize why, and start cursing.

  I'm on board the Mabuse. The Mabuse is a converted Type 1135.6 guided missile frigate, from the Severnoye Design Bureau with love, by way of the Indian Navy. They may have stripped out the VLS cells and the deck guns, but they didn't remove the damage control or countermeasures suites or rip out the shielded bulkheads. This used to be a warship, and its internal spaces are designed to withstand the EMP from a nearby nuclear blast: WiFi doesn't tunnel through solid steel armor and a Faraday cage very well. If I'm going to hack my way into Billington's communication center I'm going to need to find a back door in: an occult network as opposed to an encrypted one.

  I pop the other USB stick out of the distal end of the bow tie. It's a small plastic lozenge with a USB plug at one end and a handwritten label that says RUN ME. I plug it in, then spend ten minutes adding some modifications to its startup scripts. I pop it out then reach down and pick up my dress shoes. What was it, left heel and right shoelace? I strip out the relevant gizmos and stuff them in my pockets, hit the boss button, and flip the cummerbund upside down so that it's just taking a nap in front of the TV. They haven't given me back my gun, my phone, or my tablet PC, but I've got a Tillinghast resonator, an exploding bootlace, and a Linux keydrive: down but not out, as they say. So I open the door and go looking for a source of bandwidth to leech.

  A modified type three Krivak-class frigate displaces nearly 4,000 tons when fully loaded, is 120 meters long — nearly twice as long as a Boeing 747 — and can slice through the water at sixty kilometers per hour. However, when you're confined in a luxury suite carved out of the vertical launch missile cells and what used to be the forward magazine and gun turret, it feels a whole lot smaller: about the size of a large house, say. I make the mistake of going too far along a very short corridor, and find myself eyeball to hairy eyeball with a guard in standard-issue black beret and mirrorshades.

  One sickly smile later I'm staring at a closed door: I'm on a long leash, but this is as far as I'm going to get.

  I'm about to go back to my room when two guards step into the corridor ahead of me. "Hey, you."

  "Me?" I try to act innocent.

  "Yes, you. Come here."

  I don't have much in the way of options, so I let them lead me downstairs, along a corridor under the owner's territory, and then out into the working spaces of the ship. Which are painted dull gray, have no carpet or woodwork to speak of, and are full of obscure bits of mechanical clutter. Everything down here is cramped and roughly finished, and from the vibration and noise thrumming through the hull they've only soundproofed the executive suite. "Where are we going?" I ask.

  "Com center. Mrs. Billington wants you." We pass a bunch of sailors in black, working on bits of who-knowswhat equipment, then they take me up a staircase and through another door, down a passage and into another doorway.

  The room on the other side of it is long and narrow, like a railway carriage with no windows but equipment racks up to the ceiling on both sides of the aisle and instrument consoles every couple of feet. There are seats everywhere, and more minions in black than you can shake a stick at, still wearing mirrorshades — which is weird, because the lighting's dim enough to give me a headache. There's a continuous rumbling from underfoot which suggests to me that I'm standing right above the engine room.

  Eileen Billington's suit is a surreal flash of pink in the twilight as she walks towards me. "So, Mr. Howard." Her smile's as tight as a six-pack of BOTOX injections. "How are you enjoying our little cruise so far"

  "No complaints about the accommodation, but the view's a bit monotonous," I say truthfully enough. "I gather you wanted to talk to me"

  "Oh yes." She probably means to smile sweetly but her lip gloss makes her look as if she's just feasted on her latest victim's throat. "Who is this woman"

  "Huh?" I stare blankly until she gestures impatiently at the big display screen next to me.

  "Her. There, in the cross hairs."

  We're standing beside a desk or console or whatever with a gigantic flat display. A black beret sitting in front of it is riding herd on a bunch of keyboards and a trackball: he's got about seventy zillion small video windows open on different scenes. One of them is paused and zoomed to fill the middle of the screen. It's an airport terminal and it looks vaguely familiar, if a little distorted by the funny lens. Several people are crossing the camera viewpoint but only one of them is centered — a woman in a sundress and big floppy hat, large shades concealing her eyes. She's got a messenger bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, and she's carrying a battered violin case.

  Very carefully, I say, "I haven't a clue." Hopefully the noise of my heart pounding away won't be audible over the ship's engines. "Why do you think I ought to know her? What is this, anyway?" I force myself to look away from Mo and find I'm staring at the console instead, tier upon tier of nineteeninch rackmount boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling. I blink and do a double take. They've got lockable. cabinet fronts, but there's a key stuck in the one right above the monitor. I can see LEDs blinking behind it, set in what looks suspiciously like the front panel of a PC. Suddenly the USB thumb drive in my pocket begins to itch furiously. "You've sure got a lot of toys here."

  Eileen isn't distracted: "She has something to do with your employers," she informs me. "This is the monitoring hub." She pats the monitor. Some imp of the perverse tickles her ego, or maybe it's the geas. "Here you see the filtered take from my intelligence queue. Most of the material that comes in is rubbish, and filtering it is a big overhead; I've got entire call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore trawling the inputs from the similarity grid, looking for eyes that are watching interesting things, forwarding them to the Hopper for further analysis, and finally funneling them to me here on the Mabuse. Computer screens and keyboards where the owners are entering passwords, mostly. But sometimes we get something more useful ... t
he girl on the cosmetics stand in the arrivals terminal at Princess Juliana Airport, for example."

  "Yes, well." I make a show of peering at the screen. "Are you sure she's who you're looking for? Could it be one of that group, there?" I point at a bunch of wiry-looking surf Nazis with curiously even haircuts "Nonsense." Eileen sniffs aristocratically. "The surge in the Bronstein Bridge definitely coincided with that woman crossing the immigration desk — " She stops and stares at me with all the warmth of a cobra inspecting a warm furry snack. "Am I monologuing? How unfortunate." She taps the black beret on his shoulder. "You, take five."

  The black beret gets up and leaves in a hurry. "It's very unfortunate, this geas," she explains. "I could spill important stuff by accident, and then I'd have to send him to Human Resources for recycling." Her shoulder pads twitch up and down briefly, miming: What can you do? "It's hard enough to get the staff as it is."

  "This looks like a great system," I say, fingering the frame of the workstation. "So you've got access to the eyeballs of anyone who's wearing Pale Grace(TM) eye shadow? That must be really hard to filter effectively." I'm guessing that I've got Eileen's number. I've seen her type before, stuck in a pale green annex block our behind rhe donut in Cheltenham, desperate to show off how well she's organized her departmental brief. Eileen's little cosmetics operation is genuine enough, but she came out of spook country just the same as Ellis did: staring at goats for state security. (Forget the whack-jobs at Fort Bragg; there's stuff the Black Chamber gets up to that makes it very useful to have a bunch of useful idiots prancing around in public out front, convincing everybody that it's all a bunch of New Age twaddle.) Eileen isn't much of a necromancer, but she's got the ghostly spoor of midlevel occult intelligence management all over her designer suit, and she's desperate for professional recognition.

  "It's top of the range." She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it's still there: "This baby's got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence(TM) middleware cluster[11 Translation: "a bunch of computers."] connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe."

  Her smile softens at the edges, turning slightly sticky: "It's the best remote-viewing mission support environment there is, including Amherst. We know. We built the Amherst lab."

  Amherst lab? It's got to be a Black Chamber project. I keep my best poker face on: this is useful shit, if I ever get a chance to tell Angleton about it via a channel who isn't code named Charlie Victor. But right now I've got something more immediate to do. "That's impressive," I say, putting all the honesty I can muster at short notice into my voice. "Can I have a look at the front panel"

  Eileen nods. The hairs at the nape of my neck stand on end: for a moment everything seems to be limned in an opalescent glow and her gaze is simultaneously fixed on my face and looking at something a million miles away — no, infinitely far away: at an archetype I've borrowed, at an identity with the ability to sway any woman's sanity, the talent to lie like a rug and charm their knickers off at the same time. "Be my guest." She giggles, which is a not entirely appropriate sound — but sanity and consistency are in decreasing supply this close to the geas field generator (which, unless I am very much mistaken, is one deck up and five meters over from where we're standing). I reach up with one hand and flip the front panel down to look at the blinkenlights and status readouts on the front of the box. Eileen's still looking at me, glassily: I run my hand down the front panel, the palmed thumb drive between two fingers, and a moment later I twitch my finger over the reset button then flip the lid closed.

  The screen freezes for a moment, then an error message dialog box flashes up. Eileen blinks and glances at the monitor then her head whips round: "What did you just do"

  I roll out my best blank look. "Huh? I just closed the front panel. Is it a power glitch?" I can't believe my luck.

  Now if only Eileen didn't notice me stick the stubby little piece of plastic in the exposed USB keyboard socket...

  She leans forwards, over the screen. "One of the servers just went offline." She sniffs then straightens up and waves the nearest beret over: "Get Neumann back here, his station's acting up." She looks at me suspiciously then glances at the workstation, her gaze flickering across the lid of the blade server. "I thought they'd fixed the rollover bug," she mutters.

  "Do you still need me around?" I ask.

  "No." She knows something's not right but she can't quite put her finger on it: the alarm bells are ringing in her head but the geas has wrapped a muffling sock disguised as a software bug around the hammer. "I don't like coincidences, Mr.

  Howard. You'd better stick close to your quarters until further notice."

  The goons escort me back to the padded-cell luxuries of the yacht. I'm trying not to punch the air and shout "Yes!" at the top of my voice: it's bad form to gloat. So I let them shut me in and look appropriately chastened until they go away again. I chucked the tux jacket in the closet this morning. Now I rifle through the pockets quickly until I find the business !

  card Kitty gave me. Yes, it is scratch 'n' sniff on steroids: about five tiny compartments full of Pale Grace(TM) mascara, eye shadow, foundation, and other stuff I don't recognize.

  There's even a teensy brush recessed into one side of it, like the knife on a Swiss Card. Humming tunelessly I pull out the brush and quickly sketch out a diagram on the bathroom mirror — a reversed image of the one I sketched in the sand around the hire car. With any luck it'll damp down any access they've got to the cabin until they wise up and come to look in on me in person. Then I take a deep breath and imagine myself punching the air and shouting "Yes!" by way of relief. (Better safe than sorry.) Let me draw you a diagram: Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that's not all there is to ... well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let's call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.

  Eileen Billington's intelligence-gathering back end relies on a classic contagion network. The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free — it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors. When you apply a contagion field to any kind of information storage system, you make it possible to suck the data out via any other point in the contagion field. Eileen is already running a contagion field — it's the root of her surveillance system.

  I've got a PC on my desk that isn't connected to the ship's network, but I've just stuffed a clone of its brain into a machine that is on that network — so all I need to do is contaminate my own box with Pale Grace(TM), and then ...

  Well, it's not as easy as all that. In fact, at first I'm shitscared that I've broken the TV (I'm pretty sure the warranty specifically excludes damage due to the USB ports being full of mascara) but then I figure out a better way. Tracing the Fallworth graph on the bathroom mirror backwards with a Bluetooth pen hooked into the television is not the recommended way of establishing a similarity link with a network you're trying to break into — it's not even the second worst way of doing so — but it just happens to be the only one I've got available to me, so I use it. Once I've brought up the virtual interface I poke around until I find the VPN port that the USB dongle I planted in Eileen's server farm is running.

  The keystroke logger is happily snarfing login accounts, and I figure out pretty rapidly that Eileen's INFOSEC p
eople aren't paranoid enough — they figure that for systems aboard a goddamn destroyer, who needs to go to the bother of biometrics or a challenge/response system like S/Key? They want something they can get into fast and reliably, so they're using passwords, and my dongle's captured six different accounts already. I rub my knuckles and go poking around the server farm to see what they're doing with it. Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV Nation, and a ctate of Pringles: that's like being at home. Give me root access on a hostile necromancer's server farm, and I am at home.

  Still, I'm worried about Mo. That view Eileen wanted me to vet — even if Eileen bought my story — means that Mo is here, on the island, and she's under the gun. The Pale' Grace(TM) surveillance net is tracking her and the stabbing sense of anxiety that doubles as my guilty conscience tells me I need to make sure she's all right before I start trying to figure out a way to reestablish communications with Control.

  So I pull up a VNC session, log into one of Eileen's server blades using a password looted from one of the black berets, and go hunting for a chase cam.

  13: FIDDLER HITS THE ROOF

  TEN HOURS ABOARD AN AIRBUS IS NEVER A HAPPY fun experience, even in business class. By the time Mo feels the nose gear touch down on the centerline of the runway, rattling the glasses up front in the galley, she's tired, with a bone-weary exhaustion that is only going to go away if she can find the time to crash for twelve straight hours on an oversprung hotel mattress.