by Brian Craig
“I didn’t say I believed it,” Carl countered, defensively. “But if these mutant births are getting more and more frequent—well, hell, the future looks bad enough even without things like that. Do you think, when you do figure it out, you’ll be able to cure these kids?”
“That depends how it figures out,” replied the scientist. “But I doubt it. In fact…”
He was interrupted by the radio. Carl picked up the receiver.
“This is Drechsler,” said the voice at the other end, testily. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the past hour.”
“We were out of the vehicle,” Carl told him. “I left my pager on the dash. What’s up?”
“Everything. Someone’s been tampering with our webwork—we think it’s a major leak, but we can’t say for sure until the Doc checks it out. Blay’s gone—headed out into the desert—and the Sec boys scrambled a copter to chase him. They haven’t told us yet who he was working for or how much weaselling he got done, but you’d better warn the Doc that he might have lost his entire stash.”
Doc Zarathustra practically grabbed the mike out of Carl’s hands. “What kind of leak?” he demanded to know.
“We think Blay got into your PC. We don’t know exactly how, but we think he might have rigged the healthchecker to turn a blind eye to some kind of nasty—maybe a virus, but more likely a major worm. We need you to check it out for us, right away.”
Carl had never seen Doc Zarathustra look so bleak and so anxious. It was the kind of expression that could scare the hell out of people, and often did, but Carl had been around the Doc long enough to know that he wasn’t quite the ice-cold psycho some people thought. But the Doc wasn’t the kind of man to blow up—he even apologized as he handed back the mike.
Carl could understand why the Doc was so wound up. A man’s PC was an extension of himself—his extra memory. Guys on his level never hooked their PCs into the datanet for fear of infection by viruses or corruption by worms—if they wanted to take aboard webster data they always double-decanted it, taking it on to disc first and running the disc through a comprehensive health-check before unloading it into their own equipment. But no system was foolproof, and a health-check was only as good as the software which carried it out. Back at home base security was iron-tight, but out here in the sticks, where they were working in the field, there were opportunities for hacker-type trickery which could never otherwise arise.
Carl had to pluck up his courage before asking a question, but curiosity made him do it.
“How much could he have destroyed?” he asked.
Doc Zarathustra wasn’t too distraught to be asked. “By trashing the hard core—not much,” he replied, levelly. “I don’t keep all my data eggs in one basket and everything’s backed up on microdisc. I’ll have to get another PC in any case, now that one’s been invaded. It’s what may have been copied from the disc that’s worrying—I was updating the mutant data-file with the new cases, and I had data relating to some of my other projects in there too.”
“It’s unlikely that he could have taken anything out just by sneaking a worm through the healthchecker, isn’t it?” asked Carl, trying desperately to sound like a man who understood such matters as fully as a real intellectual should. Technically, he was only a minder, but he didn’t like the Doc to think of him as hired muscle.
“Why else would he do it? Blay’s been with us for years—if he was an undercover man for a rival corporation he must have been planted as a sleeper. No one goes to that much trouble for some petty act of pointless sabotage. But he can’t have drawn the data directly into the net or put it into transmissible form. In all probability, he’s taken it on microdisc, locks and all, in the hope of winkling it out at his leisure. If he’s still got the disc on him, we might get it back intact.”
“It’s a good bet,” said Carl, reassuringly. “If Security are already on his tail, there’s nowhere he can run to. They’ll catch him.”
“Perhaps so,” agreed Zarathustra, his pale brows deeply furrowed. “But the real danger is that he’s already passed on the disc to a contact, or left it in a drop to be picked up at someone else’s leisure. It won’t do any good to kill him if we don’t get the disc—in fact, hand me that mike, Carl.”
Carl did as he was told, and stayed quiet while the Doc issued strict orders to the effect that the runaway was not to be harmed.
“It’s okay,” Drechsler assured him. “Security know what they’re doing. They probably caught him by now—wait, Doc, there’s something coming through now.”
There was a pregnant pause, during which the Doc’s lips got tighter and his pale eyes more anxious.
When Dreschsler came back on, he didn’t waste any time being diplomatic. “The freakers messed it up,” he said, tersely. “Someone blew them out of the sky. They’ve scrambled a search-party but the crash site is too far away. You have to get back to base as fast as possible. They’re sending a plane to pick you up, but you’d better have a good look at the equipment first.”
Doc Zarathustra wasn’t a man for cursing, but Carl could see that he was close to making an exception.
“Get going, Carl,” he said, tersely. “We’ve got to take charge of this before those clowns in Security let the whole world know what’s happened. Take us home, as fast as you can.”
Carl didn’t bother to reply. He just put his foot down hard, and prayed that they wouldn’t run into any trouble on the road.
When the Doc finally came out, Carl could tell that the news was bad. He’d already heard a whisper about the copter, but he hadn’t been told any details—clearly the Doc had been given a full briefing while trying to figure out exactly what kind of hostile software had sneaked into his PC.
“They killed him,” said the scientist. “And then they got blown up themselves.”
“I heard,” said Carl. “Who was it—Mitsu-Makema? Chromicon? EuroCentral?”
“If only it were that simple,” said Zarathustra, with a sigh. “Let’s get something to eat, Carl—I want you in on this operation, because you’re the only Security man I know who has half a brain. They’ve got a man of their own lined up to tackle the problem, but his main concern will be saving face—I want you to look after my interests.”
Carl was a little surprised, and grateful for the trust which the Doc was willing to place in him. He’d been reasonably confident that he was making a good impression, but this was welcome confirmation. On the other hand, there was no way this was going to be an easy job, and it might be one that could mess up his whole career if it went wrong.
“Sure, Doc,” he said, quelling his anxieties. He followed the scientist to the dispensary, where they microwaved a couple of bladderpacks and got springwater from the machine. Zarathustra peeled back the plastic with his knife, very carefully, before inspecting the contents of the pack suspiciously. It was supposed to be GenTech’s finest, but it owed far more to the ingenuity of BioDiv’s food scientists than it did to Mother Nature’s Fields of Plenty. Carl could only just remember real food, but he knew that the Doc belonged to an earlier generation, and had probably seen Kansas in the days when it was one big wheatfield instead of one big sandpit.
“The worm unlocked everything,” said Zarathustra, between mouthfuls—for an intellectual, he wasn’t a particularly elegant eater. “It was a clever beast—too clever to have any obvious signs of its own origin built in. The data he managed to pry out is still encoded and locked up, but a good hacker could probably unscramble it, given time.”
“Is it valuable?” asked Carl.
“Of course it’s valuable,” said Zarathustra. “Even in vulgar commercial terms we’d be talking millions—but it’s not just details of products and services. There’s a lot of sound basic research in there—enough to save years of work for some parallel project worker. Any of our rival corporations would be quite happy to kill for it, and Blay wasn’t quite good enough to save himself from dying for it. I want it back, Carl—I think you understand
how I feel about it, quite apart from the practical matters involved.”
“Sure,” said Carl, feeling free to be a little less careful than usual. “Raiding a scientist’s PC is like raping a virgin—or so they say.”
Zarathustra didn’t seem pleased by the comparison, but he made no objection. He only said: “Do you know anything about a person called Kid Zero?”
Carl raised his eyebrows. “Only what I see on the Homer Hegarty show,” he said. “Same as everybody else knows, I guess.”
“Who is Homer Hegarty?” asked the scientist.
Carl’s eyebrows couldn’t climb any higher, but they tried. “I guess he’s just about the most famous man in America, these days,” he said. “You must have heard of Homer Hegarty, Doc—he has the top-rated show on TV.”
“Does he work for us?” asked Zarathustra, in all apparent innocence. It was the knee-jerk response of anyone in GenTech—or any of the big corps—when told that somebody was important.
“Not really,” said Carl, still not quite able to believe that anyone—even someone who hated TV—could not know who Homer Hegarty was. “He’s on ZBC, but likes to pretend he’s independent—just like the President. He has this newsvid show, only the kind of news he deals in isn’t the same as you get in the bulletins. He says it’s the real news, but that’s just a line. He says that he’s the only man really involved in chronicling the decline and fall of the American Empire, because he’s the only man who doesn’t turn a blind eye to what’s really going on. He follows all the gangs—films their raids and their battles from a copter. He keeps track of all the ops and the bounty hunters, but he keeps track of all the bandits too—talks a lot of hooey about the new frontier and the importance of the outlaw as an American archetype. He claims to be neutral but you can tell that he admires the bad guys more than the good guys—loves bikers, in particular. He calls them the only authentically free men in the so-called free world. Most of the guys he builds up get killed eventually, but some of his old favourites go on and on. Kid Zero is a psycho who takes a particular delight in blowing up our wrappers—he had a girl-friend once who was in a BioDiv experiment which went wrong. You must have heard of him, Doc!”
“I thought the name was familiar,” admitted the scientist. “That may help to explain why he blew up the helicopter which was chasing Blay.”
“Kid Zero blew up the bird! I thought it was Blay’s contacts—the ones he was taking the disc to.”
“Perhaps Kid Zero was his contact—he may work for one of our rivals.”
“Not according to Homer. Homer says that guys like the Kid are the only people in the world who know who their real bosses are, because they’re the only people in the world who haven’t got any.”
“Do you believe him?”
Carl couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d innocently taken aboard yet another old wives’ tale. Instead of answering, he asked a question of his own: “What happened to the disc that Blay ripped off?”
“Nobody seems to know,” said Zarathustra, grimly. “When the follow-up team got there Blay was dead. There was a deep flesh-pocket in his thigh, but it was empty. Because the copter crew was wiped out we can’t be sure that Blay didn’t pass the disc on before he met his untimely end, but we do know that the man who shot down the copter—Kid Zero—rode out to the wreck afterwards. He may even have been able to talk to Blay. It’s possible he doesn’t have the disc, but…”
“But he has to be the red-hot favourite,” Carl finished for him. “And SecDiv have to pick him up before he sells it to someone who knows how to decode it.”
“I want you to go after him too,” Zarathustra reminded him.
“It’s not really my bag,” said Carl, uneasily. “I rode shotgun on the wrappers often enough when Bro and I were just mercy boys, but all I know about bikers is what they look like when they’re shooting at you.”
“The Security Division operative will presumably have that kind of expertise, Carl,” said Zarathustra, wiping his hands fastidiously as he finished his meal. “But I want this handled as quietly and as sensitively as possible. If we can only keep the theft secret, you might be able to get it back before anyone else—including Kid Zero—realizes what’s on the disc. And there’s something else, too.”
Carl knew that the Doc was a genius, but he also knew that there were certain features of the real world with which he was not entirely familiar. It was easy enough for him to make casual remarks about keeping matters secret, but this affair had already had more than its fair share of publicity. He said nothing, though, but only looked quizzically at his companion, waiting to be told what the “something else” might be.
“When I inquired of our Security men as to who Kid Zero might be, they told me one interesting fact which you have so far omitted to mention,” said the scientist.
Carl controlled a frown. He hadn’t realized that this was a guessing game. He knew that he had only a couple of seconds to redeem himself.
“Oh,” he said, dully, “the snake. According to Homer, the Kid rides around with a big rattler for company—a tame rattler, as loyal as any damn dog.” Carl didn’t like snakes. He didn’t even like thinking about snakes; that was why it hadn’t occurred to him to mention the item when the Doc had asked him what he knew about Kid Zero.
“Carl,” said Zarathustra, gently, “there is no such thing as a tame and loyal rattlesnake—unless it is a very peculiar mutant. I’d very much like to meet that snake, Carl. So I want you to do two things for me, if you can: I want you to make sure that my data doesn’t fall into any more wrong hands than it already has, and I want you to bring me that snake, dead or alive—but preferably alive. Do you think that you can do those things?”
It was one of those occasions, Carl thought, when diplomacy took precedence over honest calculation. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound as if he was the kind of guy who could handle anything. Then, more cautiously, he added: “At any rate, I’ll do the very best I can.”
It wasn’t easy, he realized, to be the strong right arm of a man like Dr Zarathustra. But nobody had ever promised him that life was going to be easy, and even if they had, experience would soon have made it clear to him that it was a damn lie.
3
Pasco scowled at Carl Preston, and saw him look away uncomfortably. Pasco knew that he had a big advantage when it came to scowling, by virtue of the fact that half his face was a wreck. That was one of the reasons why he’d never had the wreck fixed up, apart from the artificial eye—and he’d deliberately chosen a new eye which looked anything but natural. Synthoflesh patching was almost indistinguishable from the real thing, even on the face, and souped-up electronic eyes could be matched so closely that you could hardly tell them apart from real ones, but Pasco was a guy who liked to disconcert people. He liked to be frightening. It wasn’t difficult, given that he was such a tall man—he towered above Preston, who wasn’t small—and such a hard-voiced one. The face just put the final finishing touch to his frightfulness.
“I’m taking my own team out,” said Pasco levelly. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take you along. I know you have experience, but it’s not strictly relevant to this kind of work.”
“It’s what Dr Zarathustra wants,” Preston replied, politely but firmly.
Pasco could see how uncomfortable Preston was—and he knew that it wasn’t just the sight of his intimidating face which created that discomfort. Preston knew well enough what he was asking, and what Pasco’s response to it was likely to be—but he was Zarathustra’s man and he had to speak with Zarathustra’s voice.
Pasco had a bad feeling about this one. It was all very well for his division head to make vague promises about backing him up—but he’d been sent to see the bioscientist all by himself, in order to be briefed before deciding what to do. The fact that the chief was staying clear probably meant that the job had a high foul-up factor: it was too likely to go wrong, in such a way as to wreck someone’s career. The buck had stopped with Pasco, and he
had none else to pass it to—no one in SecDiv, at any rate.
He had cooled down after his unfortunate encounter with the horrorshow booth, and felt razor-sharp; he knew that he would need to be.
“Well,” said Pasco carefully. “Dr Zarathustra is an important man, and I guess he can get his own way if he wants to—but I’d have to go on record as saying that I think it’s a bad move. I know what kind of world Kid Zero moves in, and you don’t. I know the kind of places we may have to go to in order to root him out, and I need a combat team whose members know the ropes—I can’t take a passenger into that kind of shooting-match.”
Pasco had started out as a bounty hunter way back in the early eighties, and had made quite a name for himself before GenTech had made him an offer to make the transfer into the big league. Kid Zero had been a babe in arms back then, but Pasco had done his share of hanging out in the places which were later to be frequented by the Kid. It would have been an exaggeration to say that he knew Kid Zero personally, but he certainly knew Ace the Ace, who ran the Low Numbers—the gang of which the Kid had once been a member—and he didn’t think it was any exaggeration to say that he was an expert. He figured he knew what kind of animal Kid Zero was, and that he understood the species. He liked to think that he was still a loner at heart himself. But for the whims of fate, he thought, he might as easily have become a gangster as an Op.
