by Brian Craig
She didn’t get many knocks on her door—there weren’t many people who actually knew how to find her door, because it was in the Dead Zone of the Underground, where even the sandrats didn’t often go any more, since they had caught and eaten all the real rats. These days, it was strictly creepy-crawly territory, except for deliverymen—who usually called to warn her that they were on their way. There were other hackers in the vicinity, of course, but they would never come knocking on her door.
When she had woken up completely, she listened. If the knocker was serious, he or she would knock again; if not, she could get back to her dream.
The knock came again. Three, one, one, three. All low numbers, but all odd. That was Kid Zero’s signal.
Harriet forced herself to become more fully awake, and more sensibly alert. The Kid had been a good friend to her in times past—a good supplier. But he usually called first. He was a very polite boy.
She checked the spyhole, and was glad to see that the Kid had a gun in his hand. That meant that he was alone, and in control. She got to work on the locks. It took time to get the door open, but she knew that he wouldn’t mind. The Kid liked his friends to be careful. Those who weren’t always ended up dead.
As soon as he was inside, he said: “Is this place secure?”
“Sure,” she told him. “The burrowers put a couple of new wires into my equipment last month, but I’m too smart for them. I just feed ’em garbage.”
“What about ordinary bugs? Micromikes and fibre-eyes?”
Her little eyes couldn’t take a lot of narrowing, but she squinted at him suspiciously. Her head wasn’t quite straight, because of the fuzz which the last downer had left. “This is a low-level operation I run here, Kid,” she said, “and I don’t turn the kind of tricks anyone would want to watch. Nobody would bother. What’s the matter, Kid—you hotter than usual?”
“I’m not sure,” he told her. “Maybe not, but it pays to be careful. Lady Venom’s picking up bad vibes.”
Harriet looked around when he said that, just in case Lady Venom had sneaked in while she wasn’t looking. She knew that the rattler could be trusted while the Kid was around, but she still didn’t like the snake. Nobody did, except the Kid—who was presumably a very special person.
Harriet cleared a space for the Kid on one of her dusty old armchairs, and he sat down. Then she cleared one of her hotrings and switched it on so that she could make coffee.
“Hungry?” she asked.
The Kid nodded, and she started looking round, wondering where she might have buried the food. Kid Zero was entitled to four-star hospitality; he had brought her a healthy percentage of her recently-acquired supplementaries, and though she’d paid him for all of them, she still figured that she owed him in the subtler currency of favours and goodwill.
“You need anything else,” she asked casually, while she was rooting around, “or is this a social call?”
“I had to come to you first,” he said cryptically. “I’m not quite sure where else I need to go. Maybe you can help me decide.”
“You want me to go fishing for you?” she asked.
“That might be too dangerous,” he said. “GenTech’s involved, and they have a lot of weasels.”
She sniffed derisively. “You think I’m stupid or something?” she asked sharply.
“I know you’re the best,” said the Kid. “But that’s not the point. I have to minimize the risk, or we could both be in trouble. Dead trouble.”
The coffee was hot by now—it was ersatz, of course, but it was hot and sharp. Harriet didn’t like to use anything stronger for upward boosts if she could help it; she got her heavy kicks electronically, delivered straight into the brain.
“I don’t want you to link up to the net,” the Kid continued. “Just play some games with a PC for me—and give me some names.”
“What games?” she asked warily.
He drank thirstily from his cup, and didn’t hesitate when she passed him some broken hi-pro biscuits that looked unappetizing even to her. She figured that she must have had them squirrelled away for years, but didn’t bother to wonder how they’d come to light now. It was just one of those happy accidents.
“I just need you to copy a disc for me,” the Kid told her. “You can keep a copy if you want. But you better watch out when you try to read it or sell it on. It’s hot, and it might just be red hot. If you bank it in your thigh they won’t hesitate to cut your leg off at the waist to make sure you can’t access it.”
He took the disc out of his pocket and showed it to her. He didn’t bother to warn her to be careful, but she knew that he was only being polite. She knew well enough that if the disc carried anything interesting it would probably be bristling with safeguards. One wrong move would probably trash the whole thing.
Harriet was always extra-careful to avoid wrong moves.
“Any idea what’s on it?” she asked.
“Not the slightest,” he said. “But it’s GenTech, and some guy got himself killed trying to do a runner with it. According to his ID he wasn’t weaselling for a rival corp, but you know ID. Can’t trust anyone to tell you his real name.”
“Real names is real power,” she quoted, softly. “Okay Kid, let’s take baby to the hospital.”
She stuck the three middle plugs on her left hand into the sockets of a personally-tailored PC. She didn’t need a keyboard with that kind of intimate engagement, and the screen came immediately to life. She slid the disc into the machine, and began to feel around for the locks and traps gathered about its loading codes. She didn’t need to go into deep trance, but after half a minute’s silence she emitted a low whistle.
She could feel the locks and traps protecting the data on the disc, and she could smell the data. It was densely-packed, highly organized and very sweet. The configurations of the data’s armour were beautiful, and very challenging. It had been stacked by a real craftsman, and the rip-off artist who’d managed to get it out in one huge piece had been a very clever boy.
“Not child’s play,” she said to her visitor. “Not child’s play at all. Very interesting.”
“Don’t try to read it,” said the Kid. “I just want to know—can you copy it?”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s already been copied. Anything the thief could do, I can do too. Are you sure you want that? If you have the only saleable copy, you’ll get a better price—unless you’re planning to deal exclusively with GenTech on a blackmailing basis.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” said the Kid. “If the guy who ripped it off had honest ID, he was a government plant—probably put in way back in President Heston’s time.”
“Shit,” said Harriet, with a brief laugh, “if I was a Heston mole I sure as hell wouldn’t poke my nose out now—not until Awfullie’s out of the White House, and probably not ever. But what difference does that make to the price of beans?”
“Maybe none,” admitted the Kid. “But there’s a possibility this isn’t just another corpwar steal. It’s just possible that I could do GenTech some real damage, for once. Everything I’ve done to them so far has just been a series of fleabites, because their pockets are virtually bottomless. But if this guy was what he seemed, he wouldn’t have tried a suicide run without somewhere to go. Somewhere out there, whatever remains of the FBI or the CIA or Army Intelligence might still have ambitions to be a power in the land. Maybe—just maybe—they can hurt GenTech far worse than any blackmail or industrial espionage ever could.”
Harriet shrugged. She understood the nature of the Kid’s vendetta against GenTech better than most, because she had known Snake Eyes and had seen what had happened to her in consequence of BioDiv’s failed experiment in biological engineering, but she still thought he was crazy. “Wishful thinking, Kid,” she opined. “If the CIA still had teeth they’d be just one more outfit fighting their corner—except that since we all stopped paying our taxes they couldn’t possibly pay you as much as Mitsu-Makema might. So why d’you want
the disc copied?”
“Because it might be more important than one more goodie to hawk to the highest bidder,” said the Kid insistently. “It might be important enough to land GenTech in really deep shit. The corps think they own the world now, but if they ever became vulnerable, the former owners might just be able to get it back again. If there’s a chance that GenTech might take a big fall, that means more to me than a big score I’d probably never live to spend. Copy the disc, for me, Harriet, and you can keep a copy to crack at your leisure—and you can sell anything you winkle out to anyone you like, for as much as you can get. Then tell me, if you can, what I ought to do next if I’m to get this stuff to people who can use it.”
Harriet licked her withered lips, and muttered:
“Fantasyland.” But she was already going into light trance as her nervous system melded with the wiring of the PC. She knew she had to do as she’d been asked, if only for the challenge. An extra-tough disc was meat and drink to her. One of the addictions she counted to her credit was a compulsion to wrestle with the traps and snares which the other players used in order to keep people like her away from their precious data.
“How many copies do you want?” she asked dreamily.
“Four,” said the Kid promptly. “One to stash, one for you, and two to deliver to other interested parties.”
That wrenched her back from her communion with the data. “What other interested parties?” she asked, sharply.
“It’s okay, Harriet,” he said soothingly. “I’m not thinking of passing it on to another hacker. Maybe you can tell me who can do the most damage with it—if not, I have one idea of my own.”
Harriet shook her head, impatient with the Kid’s craziness—but her fingers were still engaged and she was floating off again. She let loose the sort of giggle which always came with a light electronic high. “I’m copying,” she told him. “First rule of espionage: always duplicate before you try to read. Dupe, dupe and dupe again. You want extras, you got ’em. But you be careful what you do with ’em, Kid. If this stuff can do GenTech some real damage, the copies might easily turn into so many death-warrants. I ain’t got much to lose, but there’s a lot of people far fonder of their frail freakin’ flesh than I am.”
“I know,” said the Kid grimly. “I may not act the part, but I’m one of them.”
Then the hooks pulled her into the machinery, and she was in Heaven for real. It was a very tiny heaven, to be sure, but even inside a PC there could be ecstasy. She contemplated the awful magnificence of the Gordian knot which extended itself before, around and within her; then, firmly resisting the temptation to start unravelling, she began to to coax it into self-division and reproduction.
It was almost like bestowing the gift of life; almost like playing God. Almost.
5
Carl guided the sneaker around the canyon bends without slowing down too much. The vehicle was a very smooth rider, considering the amount of armour it was carrying. Not that it was a real battle-wagon; it was built for speed and designed for discretion. From the outside, it looked like a standard slug; inside, it was an electronic wonderland, state-of-the-art in all its systems.
Pasco was still giving him the silent treatment, but he didn’t mind—it meant that he didn’t have to look at the guy. It also meant that he could really luxuriate in the experience of driving the limo.
He luxuriated a little too much, as it turned out. He was thoroughly relaxed as he steered round the next bend—and that reduced his capacity to react when he saw the flamer blocking both right-hand lanes.
Ray Pasco gasped with alarm, but when Carl had got a grip on himself he just set his jaw tightly. This was one situation he knew, and one he could deal with.
Fifty per cent of drivers would have braked, and most of the rest would have swerved to the left to go past the wreck on the wrong side of the road, but Carl’s reflexes were wired up differently because of the years he and Bro had spent riding shotgun on the wrappers. To him, a burning wreck on his own side of the road meant only one thing: a trap. He instantly assumed that the other side of the road was mined, and that the wind-scoured rocks rising steeply to either side of the road were likely to be thick with gunmen.
He went for the gap between the flamer and the canyon wall, knowing full well that it was too narrow.
He took some satisfaction from hearing Pasco gasp in alarm for a second time and begin an angry curse which he had no time to finish. Then the sneaker hit the gap, and hit the flamer too. The GenTech vehicle was armoured to take the impact, and the thick black smoke which smothered the windscreen for a second or two couldn’t hurt anyone, but it still took nerve to go through.
Carl saw that he wouldn’t have to draw a diagram for Pasco to explain what he’d done, because the flamer had been lying on its side and the impact not only spun it but made it tumble. The spin took it over the white line and on to the other side of the highway, and when it toppled over—seeming to fall in slow-motion as he watched it through the mirror, with his foot hard down on the accelerator—it fell on top of one of the mines.
The charges went off in series; one, two, three.
On three it looked as if the entire canyon was going to blow, but that was only an optical illusion. Those rock-faces had been there for millions of years, and it would take more than a few road-mines to make them crack a smile. It was just billowing dust and sand which were filling the air so turbulently: man-made dust and sand.
“Sweet freakin Jesus!” whispered Pasco. “How’d you….?”
He didn’t get a chance to complete the sentence—as Carl had known he wouldn’t. Most of the would-be wreckers were up on the heights diving for cover but there were a couple of point-men up ahead on bikes. The bikes had been positioned sideways on, and when the riders saw that the sneaker had come through the trap unscathed they hesitated, wondering whether this was one of those occasions when discretion was the better part of valour.
The hesitation was stupid, because there was no way they could run from an avenging angel which already had one-twenty kph on the clock while they were on a standing start. Carl knew that they should have left the bikes and dived for the gutter, but he also knew that if bikers had brains they probably wouldn’t be bikers in the first place. These two stayed in the saddle and reached for their guns—but their guns were light machine guns firing four-point-twos and they might as well have been pea-shooters.
Carl decided that he ought to set a good example and abide by the rule of the road, so he swung back to the right and hit the guy on that side instead of the easier target. The sneaker’s armoured hood hurled the bike out of the way while the biker followed an uncomfortable trajectory over the auto’s hood and roof before tumbling off the back end in obvious distress.
Carl didn’t even bother to shoot back at the second biker. He wasn’t a vindictive man by nature. On the simulator display which was in the centre of the dashboard the whole situation looked innocuous: the flamer was a neat red rectangle emitting little blue lines, while the two bikes were blue arrows, one of them symbolically broken.
There had been a time when Carl hadn’t approved of simulators, except for night-vision when human eyes were no good, but he had to admit that their representations had a certain delicate propriety.
There wasn’t any noticeable pursuit. The guys up top had been forced to leave their bikes some distance away, and Carl knew that by the time they’d got down to them they wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of catching a souped-up vehicle like the one he was driving. If the mines had been able to blow a hole in the chassis, or cause Carl to crash into the canyon wall, it would have been a different story—but when that ploy had failed so had the whole operation.
“How’d you know?” said Pasco, finally managing to finish his question.
“Maniax,” said Carl laconically. “No imagination at all. They tried exactly the same trick in exactly the same spot three years back. It worked then—the road was blocked and we had six wrapp
ers stuck in a shoot-out for four hours. Lost eight men and three loads, and had to scramble the birdboys to get us out of trouble. Thing like that sticks in a man’s mind.”
“Shit,” said Pasco, in a tone which suggested that Carl had just gone up a notch in his estimation. “Maniax, you say?”
“The guy I hit was wearing their colours,” said Carl.. “But the question isn’t who they were—the question is, who hired them?”
Pasco frowned. He had a very ugly frown, thanks to his wrecked face. He didn’t bother to wonder aloud whether they might just have had bad luck, running into a random trap—he was as healthily paranoid as the next man, and he picked up Carl’s train of thought immediately.
“The Maniax don’t usually do mercenary work,” he mused. “You think they were laying for us?”
“Maybe not,” Carl conceded. “But they were laying for someone, and we’re the ones who nearly got caught.”
“No one’s supposed to know we’re on the case, let alone which way we’re headed,” Pasco pointed out. “So much for freakin’ secrecy.”
“If those guys were paid to stop any GenTech vehicle headed for the Underground,” Carl pointed out, “somebody else must have reasoned things out the same way we did. Unless we have weasels deep inside our own operation, the only people who could have done that are the people who were waiting to collect from Blay. They might have got to the wreck before your guys did—they may even have seen the Kid ride off.”
“In that case,” said Pasco tautly, “I have to call up some real support. Your secret ain’t a secret any more.”
Carl knew that he was on the spot, so he thought fast. Maybe Pasco was right—but there was another way to look at it.
“Maybe there’s still a clever way to play it,” he said speculatively. “So far, it may be still between us and Blay’s people—and if they’re paying off scum like the Maniax to lay traps for us, it’s obvious that their own resources are limited. They must figure that they can’t get to the Underground ahead of us—not in strength, anyhow. The odds are that there are only a handful of them. If we can lure them out into the open, we can find out what this is all about—but if we start a big panic, they’ll just fade away into the confusion when everybody and his cousin starts taking an interest in what Kid Zero has.”
