This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  “All right. Thank you, Che. Keep watching.”

  The secretary bowed and withdrew.

  All right now. It was time to remember that there were other enemies, very real, whom he had to watch. Not aliens, nor saboteurs, but men and women who wore the same Guild sigil that he did. They were his allies in name, but no Guildmaster was foolish enough to believe that alliance was anything more than a token gesture. At least not anyone who had climbed as far up the ladder of Guild hierarchy as he had.

  This E-month the competition was even more intense than usual, thanks to Lucifer. The Prima had chosen her five most trusted Guildmasters, and in doing so, defined the field of battle for them all. Kent had no doubt that any one of them would go after him in a minute if he gave them the opening to do so. Even Ra. Gentle, accommodating, hedonistic Ra. He trusted her least of all, for he knew from his own experience what kind of monster could lie coiled behind such a pleasant façade. Those who seemed most above suspicion were the ones you had to suspect the most.

  Like all the Guildmasters, he had a cadre of communications experts who kept watch over his rivals’ encrypted transmissions. His had been working double time since the day the Prima met with them, not only searching for Lucifer’s source, but keeping a close eye on the others who were searching. He knew Delhi well enough to know that she thrived on situations like this, for a snake strikes best when its prey is distracted. He had spies in her node, of course, and mechanical spycams, and even a few data pirates whom he paid under the table, just to back up his more legal efforts. It was more effort than he had expended with any other Guildmaster, but she was truly dangerous, and only a fool would underestimate her. Varsav was devious but not as openly malicious, and Hsing’s focus had all been internal since the day he returned from Guera. Nevertheless Kent went over their records as well, looking for some change in the pattern of data transmission which would indicate that something unusual was happening. A peak in communications activity, for instance, much like that which had drawn his attention to Delhi’s node about an E-month ago. Some big project was underway in that woman’s house, and the laws of political survival demanded that he figure out what it was.

  He was halfway through the report on Delhi’s activity when something began to bother him.

  He shut down the data feed for a moment, so that his eyes saw nothing but the real world again, and tried to put his finger on just what manner of unease was stirring in the back of his brain, begging for definition. Something about the pattern of his search, the significance of a sudden peak in communications activity—

  Or maybe ... the lack thereof?

  Very slowly, very calmly, he loaded the League chip into his headset again. And scanned the figures which his people had provided. No peak of activity there ... but maybe just the opposite. Was that significant? He flashed an icon that would connect him to the house computer, gave instructions for isolating the information he needed, and waited several seconds while it digested the project. Then fresh new data began to scroll across his field of vision—a record of communications activity for the League during the past few E-months—and the numbers were remarkably uniform, profiling an active station with pretty much regular business in the outworlds.

  Until now.

  With a frown he flashed an icon to call his secretary back in. Arbela must have been close by, for the knock came almost immediately.

  “Come in.”

  The secretary looked puzzled. As well he should, given that Kent was a creature of ritual and habit, and this behavior fell into neither category. “Sir?”

  “Those files you gave me on the League. The com report.” He paused. “Was it complete?”

  Arbela’s brow furrowed. “It’s the same report you’ve gotten each day, sir.”

  “You’re sure? Nothing’s been left off? This is complete, absolutely complete as is?”

  “Yes, sir. But I can check, if you like.”

  “Please do.”

  Arbela hesitated. “May I ask ... sir ...”

  He stood, banishing the strange data from his head with a thought. “Let’s say for now the League is ... unusually quiet. Remarkably so. I don’t know yet what that means, but I have no doubt it’s significant.” Damn it all, he could think of a hundred reasons why a station would suddenly become more active—a thousand, easily—but the opposite? How did you explain something like that?

  It might not be Lucifer, he thought, but something unusual is going on there. “Confirm the data for me,” he ordered Arbela. “Then let’s start a more detailed sampling of the League’s transmissions. I want to know why they’re suddenly going quiet. Any ideas you have are welcome. This is most unusual.” He shook his head in frustration. “Do we have informants on their station?”

  Arbela hesitated. “Yes, sir. Two, as I recall. Do you want me to get in touch with them?”

  “Not yet. Too risky. Let’s see where the data analysis takes us first, so we know what questions to ask.” He scowled, then flinched slightly as a twitch in his arm told him that yet more sedative was being released. “This may all be innocent as hell, but if that’s the case I want it confirmed. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  He waved the secretary out with a short gesture. Che was a good man, he’d find the data if it was there. And of course Kent had his spies in the League, who could help him when it came time for a real investigation. He had spies everywhere that it mattered, even in Delhi’s own household. How else did you keep control of your enemies, and make sure that friends were what they claimed to be?

  With a sigh he called up the League’s data once more, and began to scrutinize it closely.

  Chezare Arbela walked quickly through the Guildmaster’s house, flashing orders as he went. Instructions went out to Kent’s programmers, to his analysts, to the people who designed and maintained his spy-eyes, everyone. They all had their part to play in this, and Arbela’s job was to orchestrate the overall effort so that each part was not only perfect, but perfectly intermeshed with all others.

  He would do that, of course. It was his job. It was what he excelled at, and the reason Kent had hired him.

  SEND ME A COURIER, he instructed.

  How the Guildmaster must value Arbela, who had served him faithfully for so many years. How content Kent must be to know that he had such a capable and intelligent man to rely upon, one who could serve as a true extension of his will in all things.

  The courier met him in his outer office. He looked like a mere boy, whose bland countenance seemed devoid of any profound emotion. The age was the result of surgical art, of course, and the expression a sign of his professional competence. Live couriers had no value if they stood out from the crowd. This one would go unnoticed, he was willing to bet, even by Delhi’s hawk-eyed crew.

  Arbela took out of his pocket a chip he’d had ready for weeks, and watched while the boy uploaded it into his brainware. Data pirates might intercept the transmissions from a station, but they were hard pressed to pick out which traveler among millions had a vital letter tucked in between his brain cells. A simple enough program allowed the courier to store his message without giving him access to it, so that he might carry it in safety. And even if the message were hijacked somehow, Arbela knew that no one could break through its encryption, save the one person it was meant for.

  He imagined the words as they would appear before that person’s eyes, blood red letters against a background as black as space itself.

  THE STILL WATERS STIR. ACTION IS REQUIRED.

  “Go,” he commanded. The courier obeyed. Arbela’s program would give him further instructions on the way.

  Now, Arbela thought, the game begins in earnest.

  Until you understand how the enemy thinks—so well that you can pass for one of his own—you have no hope of ever controlling him.

  DR. KIO MASADA;

  “The Enemy Among Us”

  PARADISE NODE PARADISE STATION

  IT SPOOKE
D Phoenix, what had happened in Northstar.

  It wasn’t like he’d never gotten caught before. It was just ... a weird move that guy pulled on him. Too clever to be security, they just didn’t think like that. And yet ... a hacker?

  Some of his diversionary programs had reported back to him. He had them do that sometimes, just to see who was following him and how far they got. It was risky, since anything coming back to him could be traced, but he had them do it way after the fact, long after security had stopped watching for him. And of course, he’d put in safeguards there, too ... though he wondered now if this guy couldn’t get through them. Damn, he’d been fast!

  Anyway, he checked those programs out and then just sat back in amazement, not quite believing what he saw. And then he took a chance and actually hacked back into Northstar himself—they’d increased the security since his last visit, so it took nearly five minutes—to see what was left of the gateways he had set up. And to check who’d tried to go through them.

  Every one had been tested. Every single one.

  By the same program.

  Now, if you’d told him that twenty or thirty had been breached, he’d have said that he expected it. Most guys would try that many before they realized that sheer numerical odds were against them. If you told Phoenix that some guy had waded through a hundred or so to find the one most likely to lead to him ... well, maybe if he was determined enough he might, though most guys just gave up when they realized they could no longer catch him in realtime. But every single one? Statistically speaking, that meant that once his pursuer had figured out which way Phoenix had gone, he hadn’t come right after him, but had inspected all the other gateways first. What a bizarre move. What kind of security worked like that, long after they knew the trail was cold?

  Unless he wasn’t smart enough to figure out which way Phoenix had gone.

  Yeah, right.

  So that made him nervous. Enough that he beefed up his own in-house security and sent out a few sniffers looking for the guy’s equipment signature. He’d picked that up from one of the gateways—a refinement he’d only added recently—and it was hard to say how he felt when he saw the results. Pleased, that he’d gotten away from someone using an experimental Sonroya prototype? Or doubly spooked, that someone with access to state-of-the-art equipment was so obviously interested in him?

  All right, so the sniffers would look for this guy. In the meantime, it really bothered Phoenix that he’d had to leave a copy of the virus behind. He hadn’t dared go right back to search for it, for fear his pursuer was watching for such a move, but he’d come back a day later to scoop it up. No luck. It was gone from the cyber horizon, and all his cursing about the hours he’d put into making sure it couldn’t wander off on its own was wasted. He, Phoenix, key man in one of the sleekest hacking cadres in outspace, had loosed another copy of the damned thing into the outernet. If his fellow moddies found out about that, they’d have him flayed alive and brain-fried. And he wouldn’t try to argue them out of it.

  “Hello?”

  The unexpected noise broke his concentration, and the code which had been hanging in midair disappeared in favor of a shimmering hourglass. That wasn’t like Chaos, to say something to him while he was so clearly working. He turned to the source of the voice ... and then realized it wasn’t Chaos. Of course not. Chaos was dead, fried by the same virus he had just let loose. This was someone else.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  It was the girl from Nuke’s.

  How soft she seemed, compared to yesterday. All of her self-assurance must have slipped away while she was sleeping. He pulled out a chair for her and pushed it over. She was wearing a shirt he’d given her the night before, a big knit thing from Chaos’ stuff. Only he realized now that it hadn’t belonged to Chaos, really, but was one of his own that she’d commandeered months ago. On this girl it was really oversized, and those hesitant blue eyes combined with the loose folds of somebody else’s shirt made her look just too waiflike for words.

  In a strange way that was even more attractive than how she’d looked the day before. He found he had to clear his throat before saying anything. “Um, you want some breakfast?”

  She looked around dubiously at the cluttered apartment, where the containers of at least five previous breakfasts were still to be seen. Her spiky hair had flattened down overnight, he noticed, and now you could see just how bad the cut was. Unless some planet thought that ragged mess was fashionable. Jesus, it looked like someone had just taken scissors and lopped it all off.

  Use your brain, Phoenix. She’s in hiding. Wants to look different. Did it herself, maybe?

  Well, on a station like Hellsgate no one cared, but on Paradise people were fashionable enough that mistakes tended to get noticed. And he was willing to bet that the last thing she wanted to be, was noticed. He’d have to get her to a real stylist soon, or at least someone who could fake it better than that.

  Speaking of which. The sniffers should be back soon.

  She wrapped her arms around herself in a hesitant, vulnerable kind of way that shouldn’t have gotten to him, but it did. “Yeah. That would be nice.” There was hunger in her voice, pretty obvious once he listened for it. Strange that she hadn’t asked for anything before ... or maybe not so strange, if she didn’t want to stress this unexpected hospitality which had come to her out of nowhere.

  “What would you like?”

  A hesitation. “What do you have?”

  He got up from where he was working and maneuvered through the narrow path that wound between equipment benches, to where the keeper was. Opening it, he read off the labels of ingredients to her, shelf by shelf. Most of it was juice and fizz and stuff, but there were actually a few things that might have nutrients in them. Mostly stuff that Chaos had left behind. He read those labels off slowly, hoping she’d catch the hint. She looked like she needed some real food in her.

  She chose a package of faux eggs and he decided to try the same. Thirty seconds to nuke them while he searched for clean plates. Usually he just ate stuff out of the packages, but this was different; she was company. In the end he could only find one plate that didn’t have something old and dry stuck to it, so he put his in the cleaner and gave it a few seconds to vibrate the hardened crap off. That and the eggs finished up about the same time. He served them with a flourish, then chilled her a box of juice while she settled down into Chaos’ old chair to eat.

  God, she was pretty. More now than before. That had been a kind of obvious sex thing that went straight to your groin, circumventing the brain. This, this waif look, plucked at your heart strings. You wanted to help her, protect her, and feed her lots of nourishing things until the hollows under her eyes filled in and the color was back in her cheeks. He found himself almost blushing again, and turned quickly back to his work. A couple of sniffers had reported in, he saw, but he didn’t want to go online long enough to see what they’d picked up. That would be rude with company in the house.

  Like that would ever have bothered him before. Jesus.

  He picked at his own faux eggs in silence as she ate hers with considerably more gusto. When she was done, he offered her more. She hesitated, and it took no expert to read that she was trying to balance her obvious hunger against a desire not to impose too heavily on his hospitality ... so he just went ahead and cooked them up and gave them to her. These were chocolate chip. She looked at them pretty strangely, but ate them all the same. The way she handled her fork implied she had come from somewhere where pretty table manners mattered. For a moment he felt embarrassed about the cluttered state of his abode ... then thought, fuck it, she’s a fugitive and I gave her safe haven, so she’d better have no problem with this.

  “So, like, Jamisia.” He coughed a couple of times to loosen up the words that were catching in his throat. “I take it you’ve got a problem here that goes beyond money.”

  The blue eyes fixed on him, round and wide and ... what? Not quite scared.
There was something else in those depths that wasn’t just a lost waif, but someone very carefully dissecting his every word for hidden meaning. Spooky. Of course, she’d noticed his use of her real first name; he’d gotten that off the finance chip the other day. He’d thrown it at her to see her reaction, but she didn’t seem surprised. It was almost as if the name she was called was irrelevant to her.

  “Maybe,” she said softly.

  “The security bug on your accounts yesterday, that wasn’t just looking for you, it was looking for anyone wanting information on you.” He paused, drinking in those blue eyes for a moment. “Now, if this is drug stuff, or something else really black market, I’ll be happy to feed you and get you on your feet, but then you’ve got to go.”

  “And if not?”

  If not ... would she stay? He felt strangely unwilling to meet that thought head on. “This is Paradise Station, and you probably don’t know this, but there’s a pretty strong popular movement against ... certain things.” Like, Mama Ra lets us fuck around pretty freely, provided we don’t fuck with her. “So ... it’s not like I really think you would be into that ...”

  “I’m not,” she said. She set the empty plate aside—she’d scraped up every last tidbit of egg, leaving it almost perfectly clean—and then straightened up in her chair. The softness in her eyes gave way to something that seemed almost ... harder, somehow. More crisp. She seemed to consider for a moment, her eyes strangely unfocused, as if she were ‘netting with someone. But of course she wasn’t, not without a headset. You couldn’t do that. Right?

  “It’s espionage,” she said quietly. “Corporate. Terran corporate.” She paused. “My father ... did research. He died before that was finished. Some of his rivals think I know what it was about.”

  He had to ask it, of course. “Do you?”