“It’s Jackie,” Jackie said. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”
“No, of course— How? I mean, what do you think I’m doing that might kill you?”
“This crate! This fraggin’ crate! The padlock’s a fraggin’ mine that’ll detonate on vibration if I hit the fraggin’ walls too hard! And he’s got some sort of electrical fence built into the walls! And that’s just what I found for starters. There’s no way I’m trying this by myself.”
“No. No, of course not. Don’t worry about it. You did enough. Go home.”
"Yeah. Thanks. Did you mine my place while I was (’one, too, or can I expect that to be normal?”
“It’ll be normal. Bye.”
He snapped the phone shut and turned to X-Prime. "(ireat holy hell, man,” he said. “What do you have mside that crate?”
X-Prime just smiled, and Cayman looked at him oddly, like a proud parent. Maybe these two would do alter all, Bannickburn thought.
He’d walked for two hundred meters before he remembered that he’d forgot to ask Jackie about a mage who could be a supplier for this mission. Oh well, he lliought. It could wait.
11
Always take a moment. That was Bannickburn’s rule. The lead-up to a run was usually hectic and stressful, what with the attempts at concealment and the looming possibility of death, but it was also some of the most fun you could ever have in your life. Usually you had a decent bankroll to buy some new toys, and you had the intoxicating feeling of power, of being the only person in the world (well, one of only a few) who knew what you were up to. Soon, at least a few other people would know about your work, and most of them would be quite sorry. For now, though, the knowledge and the delicious anticipation were all your own.
So Bannickburn always made sure to enjoy at least a single moment in the day before a run, to stop and just soak it all in.
The moment he found in this day came when he was looking at himself in a mirror. The past two hours had been extremely clumsy and inefficient, using wigs and spirit gum to accomplish what he’d once been able to do in a few short seconds of spellcasting. But in the end, the effect was what he needed. His sideburns had vanished (without, of course, being shaved off), his hair was light brown, his face rounder and softer. He didn’t recognize his image in the mirror as himself, which was exactly the way things should be. So he looked in the mirror and he relished the sight.
It wasn’t perfect, though. A few shadows he’d applied looked a little off, a few hairs didn’t look natural, and the bulged skin near his ears still made him appear like lie was suffering from some bizarre disease. But he was making progress, and he was enjoying it. He hoped the rest of the team was having as much fun as he was.
Jackie, naturally, was on the Matrix, flowing through I lie network like a single cell in the universal bloodstream—that is, if blood flowed at the speed of thought. She was free of physical constraints and was all sensation—sight and sound, but mostly power. It passed through her like light through a prism, still flowing rapidly, but changed by her touch. She loved that feeling like nothing else in the world.
She always took the first moments after she jacked in for sheer pleasure before getting down to business. After one more deep breath—using lungs that seemed far, far away from where she currently was—she focused on the job at hand. First stop. Gates Casino. Not the flashy casino replica that most Matrix clients saw, but their back offices.
The icon for the online offices was quite literal, a bland, flat office building behind the sprawling neon palace of the casino. The IC back here would probably be pretty good, but not nearly as tough as it would be if she were trying to get near any of the casino’s many pots of money.
The first obstacle was glaringly obvious. The ground in front of the main door that would give her access to the Gates offices was black and shiny—a tar pit that the Gates people hadn’t bothered to alter from its out-of-the-box appearance. If she were trying to sneak into the node, the tar pit might cause her a problem. Using a deception utility or other similar means would probably trigger it, and black hands would reach out of the tar and try to throw her offline. But she’d planned for this in advance, and had a fine set of stolen passwords to use. The tar pit blinked out of sight when she submitted the right word, and she was in.
Too easy. The real fun in breaking into a system was in wrestling it to the ground and making it do your bidding. Using a password felt too . . . legitimate. But she was on a tight time schedule, and the job would work best if the Gates people had no indication that trouble was afoot. Pummeling a system was fun, but it tended to leave traces. For now, secrecy was the way to go.
Once she had access to the node, she blinked into the main room of the office building. No alarms sounded, no guard dog icons came charging, and no other form of IC was launched at her. She wouldn’t have to mangle the guy who’d sold her the passwords.
The room was mostly empty. It was big, with high ceilings and distant walls. The floor looked like gray granite, and a few granite columns broke up the huge space. There was no furniture, no decor, no doors. Apart from the columns, there was nothing extraneous here. It was a simple room with the simple purpose of funneling staff into the node.
A few icons zipped by now and then, mostly the drab gray of corporate terminal users. Jackie had picked the time for her break-in carefully, going in at seven p.m., after normal business hours but before the action in the casino really started hopping for the evening. She saw a few icons that looked like janitors, and assumed they were utilities instead of people. She watched them carefully as they blinked by—many of them were probably doing routine maintenance on the casino’s Matrix, but she’d run into more than one system that liked to disguise some particularly nasty brands of ripper IC as janitors. Ripper IC—programs that tried to rip your icon apart, kick you offline, and damage your deck while they were at it—was no fun. Thoroughly uncivil, so it was best to stay away from the stuff if you could.
There was nothing in the central room to guide the visitor about where to go, as visitors weren’t welcome here. She could spend a long time blinking here and (here in the node, looking for the right room, but that seemed wasteful. She could try asking one of the other residents of the node where to go, but few of them seemed like actual humans, and none of them would likely stop to help her. And asking for directions in a building like this was a good way to set off alarms.
She was on her own—well, she and her dog.
“Here, Rover,” she muttered. A small Scottish terrier appeared in front of her, jumping up and down, its mouth moving like it was yapping. No sound came out, though—she’d fixed that part of the utility the first time she’d used it. It was loosely rendered—its fur looked more like plastic than hair, and it was a purple color generally not found on dogs—but it was still adorable.
She scooped up the dog and spoke quietly into its ear. “Customer record. Murson Kader.” Then she dropped l he dog into a large cloth bag that went well with her icon’s flowing white dress. She let the utility stick its black nose out of the bag. It was unnecessary, since the utility wouldn’t actually smell anything, but she liked the way it looked. And she’d long ago realized the importance of image and appearance in the Matrix.
Rover made a suggestion, and she followed it. The entry room blinked out of existence, and a smaller foyer blinked in. It was even more bare than the original entry room, a space that resembled the inside of a steel safe. She saw nothing that looked like a file, but spotted a hallway off to her left.
It made sense. The Gates bosses didn’t want just anyone looking at their files, so jumping right into their file area would be prohibited. She’d have to clear another test before she got what she wanted. No problem. She had passwords for that.
She watched the hallway for two minutes and saw the same people come in and out of the various doors multiple times, many of them tracing circuitous, repetitious routes in even that small amount of time. Slave programs, she guessed.
Slave programs that were being kept fairly busy. At this time of day, keeping the customer records up-to-date would be one of the few activities that would have them hopping. Rover, actively squirming in her bag, had led her to the right place.
Time for him to go. “Home, Rover,” she said, then called her next utility. “Here, Asta.” She had another terrier in her hands, identical to the first one, but red instead of purple.
She pointed Asta down the hallway. “IC, Asta,” she said. The dog reacted like a basset hound in a terrier body. She dropped him to the ground and he prowled forward, legs bent, nose sniffing every inch of carpet.
There was something in the hallway. She knew it immediately—Asta was only this careful when he scented IC in the area. If there was nothing, he usually knew it in seconds.
The fact that there was IC in the hallway didn’t change anything, since Jackie didn’t have a wide range of available strategies. But it was good to know what obstacles might be waiting, on the off chance that things went wrong.
Asta had a bead on something. The dog stood patiently, one leg cocked, nose pointed proudly forward. Jackie absolutely loved the ridiculous way the small dog mimicked a pointer’s stance, which was why she had programmed it that way.
She picked up the terrier and instantly knew the information it had gathered. There was probe IC to make sure nothing untoward happened in this part of the node, and a pretty good ripper that would jump in if anything went wrong. Good to know, she thought, that the casino truly values its patrons’ privacy.
If all went well, she wouldn’t see a trace of the ripper. She zoomed down the hallway, hoping her passwords would keep up their sterling work to this point.
The floor made a subtle transition from charcoal gray to thundercloud gray as she entered the hallway, and then she was in. No alarms. No problem.
Except she wasn’t alone. A samurai, fully armed and dressed in crimson, stood in the entrance to the hallway. He looked beautiful, right down to the gleam on his sword blades and the ridges on his helmet. Some programmer had really cared about this one.
Unfortunately, the attention to detail hadn’t extended i
“Hello,” the samurai said, looking at nothing in particular but certainly speaking to Jackie. “I’m afraid you’ve made an improper turn. Please exit this corridor and return to areas of the building for which you have proper access.”
Jackie imagined the entire conversation that awaited her—she wouldn’t go anywhere, and the samurai would become increasingly less polite, and she might try to talk her way out of it, but of course there was no way to fool a stupid piece of IC, so they’d fight. The whole conversation seemed boring and unnecessary. Time to switch utilities.
She sent Asta away and called on another of her fleet of dogs—Daisy, a yellow dog who appeared in Jackie’s arms with an Ares Crusader in her mouth. Jackie grabbed the gun, dropped to one knee, and unloaded half a clip at the samurai.
The samurai whirled the two katana blades he carried and blocked every bullet. That’s the downside of the Matrix, Jackie thought. Every little piece of code thinks it’s a superhero.
The samurai lunged, the steel of his blades slashing out impossibly far, and she rolled, firing wildly, since she didn’t have to worry about hitting innocent bystanders. And there’s the upside of the Matrix, she thought.
She pushed herself up with her hands, flying backward as the second blade whizzed in front of her face. She had a clear target now and unloaded a few more rounds right at the samurai’s face. Again his sword easily knocked them away.
Then he came forward, a blurred mass of spinning steel. She staggered back, arms flailing, barely able to hold her gun, not able to fire it. The swords came closer and closer. Twice, she flinched as the cold metal brushed over her skin. Glancing blows only, though. For now. If those blades made any more solid contact, her icon would suffer, and she’d probably be jacked out posthaste. She couldn’t have that.
As she gradually yielded ground to the samurai, she saw a few of the blank gray icons pass right by the fight, paying her no mind. Her fight with the samurai was far outside the bounds of their programmed behavior, so to them it didn’t exist.
Jackie was running out of room. She could just blink out of the corridor at any time, of course, and evade the IC that way, but that wouldn't get the job done. The IC would still be waiting for her when she came back, maybe with some backup security protocols as reinforcements. She had to get this done now. She felt a little sad about what she knew came next, but she had one more weapon on her, and she chose to use it.
“Daisy!” she yelled as she stumbled backward. “Sic!”
The terrier leaped up gracefully, yapping silently, flying toward the samurai’s face. The samurai registered no surprise as he swiftly raised his blades and cut the dog into several small pieces. The distraction had lasted for the briefest moment, but it was enough. Jackie had already fired.
The samurai couldn’t cut the dog and block all of Jackie’s rounds. Two of them snuck through. One grazed the samurai’s temple, furrowing the flesh, but drawing no blood (a common practice, Jackie knew—most IC programmers thought that a display of blood only served to encourage attackers). The second caught him in the neck, near where his jugular would have been if he had one. He went down.
Jackie zoomed toward him, and even though she had a bare five steps to cover, she was almost too late. The samurai, knowing he was finished, had dropped one sword and raised the other to his belly, ready for seppuku. No, Jackie thought. Not yet.
She kicked the second sword out of his hands, then uploaded a simple medic utility. She didn’t need the samurai saved—she just needed him alive a little longer.
The medic, at her request, carried with it a few pieces of rope, representing her best suppression utility. She used these to bind the samurai. The knots weren’t great—the samurai would probably break free soon— hut if her calculations were right, he’d get his bonds off at about the same time the neck wound finished him. At that point, of course, his death would raise holy hell across the entire Gates Matrix—but by then, Jackie should be long gone.
She was sorry about the loss of Daisy—it would take a good few hours of programming to rebuild that particular utility-—but the dog had done the job. She called Rover back, and had the purple dog point her to the right spot.
The dog directed her to a room that, appropriately enough, looked like a file room. Tall gray cabinets lined each wall. Rover pointed Jackie to the right drawer, and she pulled it open.
True to the room’s design motif, the drawer held numerous icons that looked exactly like tan file folders. They were even alphabetized. She found one with Kad-er’s name on it and pulled it out.
She didn’t open it, instead calling Asta back to help her. The red dog gave the folder a good sniff, and Jackie had the findings immediately—scramble IC. The data was encrypted, and if the IC caught Jackie breaking in, it would be thoroughly trashed. A good password would get her past the IC, but the samurai in the hallway had been pretty solid proof that her passwords weren’t working in this part of the system.
But there was a dog for every occasion. The one she needed was a blue one named Petey, and soon the dog was in her hands.
She pointed him at the folder, then did a very undoglike thing with him. She pushed him forward until his nose touched the folder, then kept pushing. His head disappeared into the folder, and his tail wagged furiously. Jackie kept pushing until the dog’s entire head was submerged, then she stopped.
Pure code flowed through her, garbled letters and numbers that only a few people really understood. She couldn’t describe how she perceived the code—she didn’t see it, she didn’t hear it, she didn’t even really feel it. It just was.
The only limit on Jackie now was the speed of her own mind, which, when she was in the Matrix, hardly felt like a limit at all. She didn’t read the c
ode, she didn’t write any new instructions, she just pushed here and pulled there-—intuitively, almost the way an infant reaches for light, except it was all inside her head. The dog got her into the folder and offered a few helpful hints, but for the most part, this was Jackie’s work. Work she had done a thousand times before, and loved every time.
She didn’t really know which of the million tiny maneuvers she performed made the difference, but in one microsecond, the folder was closed, then it was open. There was a brief tunnel into the data about Kader, narrow and temporary, but it didn’t need to last long. She pulled all the data in the file out and copied it to two places—her deck at home and the private data haven that the few people who knew about it considered to be the most valuable collection of data in Seattle. The tunnel then closed, but the data was hers.
She pulled Petey out of the folder, the shock of losing the code feeling like a brief cardiac arrest. She casually flipped the folder over her shoulder. It flew through the air and neatly dropped into the appropriate drawer, which slid shut. Then Jackie was gone.
She made a quick stop at the foyer and went out the main entrance of the node. She didn’t want the system to get worried about her staying inside for an inordinately long time. The lobby was quiet as she left. The dying samurai hadn’t manage to raise the alarm yet.
She jacked out and sagged limply in her chair, as real-ity, with its heavy gravity and snail’s pace, reasserted its claim on her.
Cayman had offered to slap X-Prime several times. All for the good of the mission, of course.
“It’ll make your expression just right,” Cayman insisted. “The right mix of vacuity and wounded pride.”
"Not to mention several ugly bruises,” X-Prime retorted.
“Please. You know I could hit you all day without leaving a mark. Come on, just a few blows.”
“No. I think I can look stupid enough without your help.”
Cayman couldn’t argue with that, and he’d sent X-Prime off, while he sat at one of the Gates Casino’s many bars and watched his progress.
Shadowrun 44 - Drops of Corruption Page 10
