Death Match nfe-18

by Tom Clancy

  Catie burst out laughing.

  “The only condition is that I want you to keep me posted with whatever’s going on,” her mom said. “Don’t hesitate to call me at work if you need me.”

  “Do I ever?”

  “No comment. But if there’s trouble, I want to be the first to hear about it, unless your dad’s in the house. No sitting on little fires until they’re infernos before you call for help, understand?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. So get yourself out of here in an hour or so…dinner’ll be ready then.”

  “What’re you making?”

  “Hey, it’s not my night to cook,” her mother said. “I have some reading to do. Your dad’s making lasagna.”

  Catie’s mouth immediately began to water. “Fifty-nine minutes, you said?”

  “Why don’t I get that kind of response for my beef stew?” her mother said. “Ingrate! I take back everything I said about how well we’ve brought you up.” And, laughing, she vanished.

  Catie spent about half that hour reviewing the copy of the Caldera online manual that she kept in her workspace. Some of the commands she knew well enough, since the imaging tools she used most often shared them. Some were completely unfamiliar, and now she kicked herself for having been so selective about her use of this particular resource…especially because there were aspects of Caldera so powerful that Catie started to get the feeling that she had been making herself work harder than she had to. Now she sat looking at lists of commands that she had very little time to master, and feeling dumber than usual.

  When I go in there and start looking that program over, she thought, what’s to say that I won’t look right at the answer and not recognize it because I was too lazy or too unnerved to study this stuff thoroughly—

  “Hello?” a male voice said.

  Catie’s head jerked away from the manual “pages” that were hanging in the air all around her. The voice had not been that of her father or brother. “George?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind a mess…”

  George stepped in out of the empty air and looked around him with surprise, and then pleasure. “I would not call this a mess,” he said. “You built this?”

  “I mocked it up,” Catie said.

  “Nice job!”

  “Uh, I was faking it,” Catie said, feeling that this assessment was more than usually true, while George did what just about every visitor to either the real Great Hall or Catie’s duplicate did — stood there craning his neck at the paintings and mosaics under the ceiling.

  “If this is faking it,” George said, “I’d like to see what your real work looks like.”

  “Um,” Catie said, biting back about five possible self-critical remarks that she could easily have made. It was the one way she took after her father. Catie preferred to run herself down so that anyone else intending to do so would find that the job had already been done by a resident expert. “Thanks.”

  “I had a move,” George said, “but I thought I might bring it over, if you were available, instead of just mailing it in.”

  “Sure, go for it.”

  George stepped over to the chessboard and picked up a bishop which he had moved out earlier. Now he advanced it a little further along a different diagonal.

  “Space?” Catie said.

  “I’m so glad we’re on a first-name basis,” said the voice out of the air.

  George laughed.

  Catie raised her eyebrows. “Log that, will you please?”

  The text window hanging in the air promptly added a line:

  6

  KB-KN3

  –

  Catie looked at the move, and also looked at the way George was regarding the chessboard: looking more or less at it, but now suddenly not seeing it, or much of anything else, from the concerned expression on his face.

  “Can I offer you a chair?” Catie said.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  She made him one, a “comfy” one like hers, but not so beat-up, and had her space put it over by the chessboard. George sat down and stretched himself, and sighed a little.

  “Did you have a practice today?” Catie said.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah,” George said. “Some of the guys have been having their machines checked over by their service providers before the tournament, so we wanted to run them in and make sure everything was okay.”

  “I guess that’s why you’re looking like you’re incredibly worried about something,” Catie said.

  George looked at her with astonishment. “I wasn’t — was I–I mean, I—” Then he stopped, and smiled, a rather sad smile. “It shows that much, huh?”

  “If you painted the words scared and upset on your forehead, it might just give me a clearer hint,” Catie said, “but only just. George, what’s the matter?”

  He sighed.

  “Pressure’s piling up, huh…?”

  “Not just pressure.” George leaned back and looked at Catie and let out another breath. “More than that. Something worse.”

  Catie sat and waited, and didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I mentioned to you that we had an invigilator call up, didn’t I? That was Karen de Beer.”

  “Yes?” Catie said.

  “Well, she was invigilating a non-ISF server game. You can’t use the noncertified servers for tournament play, but a lot of teams have licensed the server software from the ISF for use in their informal or ‘fantasy’ play. Though the servers aren’t used for formal tournament play, the ISF sanctions their use in ‘fantasy’ tournaments and informal regionals. Karen went off to invigilate at a game between Denver and Flagstaff, and…” He trailed off.

  “And what?”

  George was looking even more uncomfortable. “Catie…I really shouldn’t be telling anyone this.”

  She opened her mouth to say “Then don’t tell me,” and then closed it. Catie got up, went over to the chessboard for a moment, picked up one of her knights, and moved it to threaten one of George’s front-rank pawns.

  For a long moment George sat there, saying nothing. Then he looked up at the dome of the Great Hall and said, “I trust you, Catie. And I don’t know who else to tell…. Some guy came to the door of Karen’s apartment this morning. He said he liked the way she’d handled the game at Denver…and he wanted to know, did she want to make some extra money.”

  “Doing what?” Catie said, sitting down again.

  He looked at her with an expression that seemed to say, Can’t you guess? “He said he represented some people who wanted Karen to invigilate spat games that they were going to be running out of another server, a private server that his people were going to be setting up. Now, this kind of thing happens…but never outside of the auspices of the ISF. The Federation publishes a list of non-tournament servers that have been inspected by them and passed for use by ISF member teams and team-candidates, spatball groups that are still serving their qualification period. Federation members don’t do invigilation work outside of the ‘passed’ servers; at least, not if they want to stay in the Federation.”

  George got up and walked around the chessboard, looking at it. “It’s tricky business, invigilating a spat space,” he said, not looking at Catie. “Besides consulting with the referee before and during the game, you have to make sure that all the parameters for temperature and air density and rotation and friction and elastic collisions and so forth are set correctly in the software, and that they stay that way — that play, or hardware or code errors, which turn up sometimes, don’t alter them, so that play stays fair. There are about fifty sets of parameters that have to be managed during the course of a match, and you have to watch them all, all the time, and be ready to alter them if the computer messes them up. It’s real easy to handle a space incorrectly, get things wrong, if you don’t have enough experience. More…if you are experienced…it would be easy enough to set the parameters wrong on purpose. Or to let other people see how it could be done.”
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  “And Karen thought they wanted her to do something like that.”

  “That, or something similar.” George breathed out, went around to his king’s knight and picked it up, walked out onto the board and set it down. The notation window flickered and said K-KB3. “The guy named a figure…said Karen could start any time.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she’d think about it. She told me yesterday that she was still thinking about it. She works in a convenience store, Catie. The figure was about three times her year’s salary. And she’s by herself, don’t forget, and she has a little girl to support.”

  “I don’t suppose he left her a Net address,” Catie said.

  “He said he’d come back in a few days and see what she had to say.” George looked at his move as if he was most dissatisfied with it. “He told her not to mention it to anyone, or there could be trouble. She told me…and now she’s scared. But she would have been scared even if she hadn’t told me, she said. And she’s scared for her little girl, too, for Carmen. Karen’s not stupid. She knows trouble when she sees it. She temporized…out of shock, I think. She was never in any doubt that she wanted nothing to do with the offer. But now she’s afraid of what the guy might say if she tells him no.”

  Catie swallowed. This was something that James Winters was definitely going to need to hear about. As long as no one notices them contacting her… But naturally Net Force would have ways to do that discreetly.

  She swallowed again. “I don’t suppose that anyone else on the team’s had anyone approach them that way,” Catie said.

  George shook his head. “If they have, I haven’t heard about it. Got another move?” he said.

  “I’m thinking about it.” But strategizing her next move was actually buried behind four or five other, more immediate concerns at the moment.

  When she looked up, she found George looking at her again. It was another of those distressed expressions, though this time he was at least trying to hide it. To Catie, the effect was simply as if he now had NOT REALLY UPSET painted on his forehead…and suddenly she knew what the problem was, or thought she did.

  “Look, I—”

  “George,” Catie said, sounding extremely severe and for the moment not caring, “it’s not like that. You think you have a monopoly on ‘not married, not dating, not gay, and no plans’?”

  He just kept looking at her. Then he sagged. “Uh,” he said, “maybe I’m doing you an injustice. It’s just that it’s rare…and seems to be getting rarer…to find friendship, in my situation. Just plain friendship. Sorry.”

  “Well,” Catie said, and let it sink in for a moment. “All right. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Tomorrow morning is the draw. The play-offs will start on Thursday at the soonest, maybe Friday. Karen’s going to have to do something. I’ve got to find a way to protect my team….”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help,” Catie said after a moment, “let me know.”

  George got up slowly, looking down at the chessboard again.

  “Call me when you have a move,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  And he went through the door that had been standing waiting for him off to one side, in the air, and it closed behind him.

  Catie sat very still for some while, considering possible moves in two very different games.

  6

  She took the predictable amount of teasing about being late for dinner, and Hal punished her for this slight on her father’s cooking by the most straightforward means possible — eating most of the lasagna and leaving Catie just enough for one serving, and nothing at all for seconds.

  When she complained, her father threw his hands up. “It’s all I could do to get him to leave the pattern on the plates,” he said. “At least there’s some sauce left. Make some pasta.”

  Normally a turn of events like this would have left Catie furious. Tonight, though, she simply made pasta, completely confusing Hal, who had been expecting — looking forward to, in fact — a far more explosive response. When Catie finished gobbling up her pasta and went straight back into the family room to use the Net machine, she heard Hal saying under his breath to her father, “You think she’s coming down with something?”

  She ignored him, got straight back into her workspace, and got back to work reviewing Caldera. Several hours passed, at the end of which her brain was buzzing with commands and obscure syntaxes that she had never thought she’d need any time soon.

  But I need them now, she thought, getting up out of the Comfy Chair at last and picking up, from the floor beside the chair where she had left it, Mark’s shining green key.

  She pulled down a window to check the schedule he had sent her of the maintenance schedule for the ISF server. Theoretically no one would be in there until tomorrow morning sometime — local time, anyway. That was the afternoon for her, since the server itself, and most of the techs who managed it, were on the West Coast. All the same, Catie was twitching as she held the key up. “Space?” she said.

  “You’re gonna get in trou-bllle…you’re gonna get in trou-blle….” her workspace manager sang, sounding entirely too gleeful about it.

  “Not nearly as much as Mark Gridley’s gonna be in when all this is over,” Catie said grimly. “He’s gonna wish the Sureté had kept him to play with. Listen, you, just open a door to get me into the ISF server. The specs for the gateway are all right here. Don’t deviate, or I’ll pull your wires out, tie them to the tree in the front yard, and chase you around it.”

  “Uh,” said her workspace manager. An open gateway popped into existence in front of Catie. Through it she could see darkness, with green lines drawn through it, running away to eternity….

  “Keep this open in case I need to leave in a hurry,” Catie said.

  “I, for one, intend to disavow any knowledge of your actions,” said her workspace manager helpfully.

  “You do that,” Catie said, and stepped through the doorway into the dark of the spat-volume server’s space.

  She spent her first few minutes there just standing, looking around her, listening, for any sense or sign that anyone else might be here. But Catie heard nothing, saw nothing, but the Cartesian grid running off in its single plane into the empty darkness. Finally she lifted the key and pushed it into the darkness.

  Obediently it cracked open before her to show her the keyhole. She turned it, and found herself, not standing in space this time, but floating inside the spat volume at the heart of the “space station.”

  “Workspace manager…” Catie said.

  “Listening, visitor.”

  “Please show me the schematic of the server software that I viewed when I was last here.”

  The image of the spat volume around her faded away, leaving her standing on the Descartean plane again. But this time the server’s software structure towered up in front of her once more, a skyscraper’s worth of code, all represented once more as squiggles and bright colors and straight lines and wavy lines and spheres, like a spaghettiand-meatball dinner with aspirations to architecture. Catie heaved a big sigh. “All right,” she said to herself, “time to start trying to figure this thing out….”

  She sat down on the green-lined “floor” and considered where to begin.

  Elsewhere, hidden away in the depths of virtuality in a dim blue-lit bar that might or might not have genuinely existed somewhere else, two men more thoroughly wrapped in shadows than ever sat on either side of one of the marble tables and studied it and their drinks, trying to avoid having to look at one another. Even here, wearing seemings, neither of them raised his voice above a whisper…though the anger in their whispers plainly indicated that both of them would have liked to shout.

  “…They shouldn’t have scored at all! Next time—”

  “Forget next time for the moment! We’re not done with last time. And they did score.” Darjan was glaring at Heming. “What do I have to do to get thr
ough to you how important this is? You need to have these routines correctly implemented by Thursday, and the people handling them clued in about what needs to be done, or there’s going to be more than just your ass on the line, my friend.” The words were spoken in a way that had nothing friendly about it at all.

  “So we’ll have them ratchet the response up a level or two.”

  “Better make sure it’s ratcheted up enough….”

  “Too much,” said Heming hotly, “and it’s going to start being obvious to the players. Then where will you be? You’ll have an independent investigation breathing down your back before you know what’s happened. Or worse still, Net Force will get involved. And then you, my friend, will find out what having your ass on the line really looks like.” He watched Darjan for his response.

  Darjan just stretched his legs out and turned his glass around on the table a couple more times. “Get it handled,” he said. “There are enough bucks being bet on Chicago at the moment that it has to be right. The gentlemen upstairs want plenty of point spread on this result.”

  “Look, I told you, it’s being handled right now. Correction has already been put in, and the techs are training on the ‘twinned’ server right now. They’ve even suckered some spatball players into helping them test the volume.”

  “Are you crazy? If the ISF—”

  “One of the people who’s been around to reassure them is ISF…or so they’ve been told. Our corporate connection.”

  Darjan still looked uneasy. “If word of that gets out—”

  “It won’t. Our connection has impressed on all his minor-league ‘helpers’ how important it is to keep the news about the new server quiet, so as not to spoil the big publicity push when ‘the people funding it’ make the announcement. But the testing has been going on for a couple of days now, and the players haven’t noticed a thing. You can practically pull the ball out of their hands and they assume it was their fault somehow.”

  Darjan mulled that over. “All right. I wouldn’t mind seeing one of these test sessions.”