Bingo. Got one already, Boss. The old woman is named Belinda Singer.
Would you believe I recognized her myself?
... I suppose. Wait. Yes, I would. 2062; she employed the Castanaveras telepaths before they were destroyed.
Background, Johnny?
Uhm ... upward of 110 years old by some indeterminate amount. Her actual age is guarded very closely. She's the SpaceFarer Collective's single largest downside shareholder. According to the Forbes 500 listing she's the twentieth or twenty-first wealthiest person in the System; she has the reputation of being friendly with known members of the Johnny Rebs.
Perhaps two seconds had passed. Trent said, "Fine by me."
"We got briefed by Domino before we agreed to come," the fat man continued. Trent had already tagged the man for Syndic. "I like most of what I hear. Loss of the Key locks them out of their own Boards for at least two or three days, while the people who have the Key--us--have at least limited access to them. A couple of months pass before they can even begin bringing up a tracking system like the one they've got right now. And maybe they don't ever get it back up again, which is a hell of a blow to Unification interests off Earth." He grinned cynically. "Also, I like how you've planned your getaway. I think you're going to kill yourself trying it, but it's a great idea."
Bingo on two, Boss. The chubby fellow is Norman Shelton. Not exactly a Syndic Lord, but close. Licensed to practice Unification Law.
The young man in the gray business suit said, in thickly accented English, "I am here representing the interests of the Erisian Claw. We would suggest one change to your plan."
"That being?"
"As you have laid this out, you are going to immense trouble to avoid harming a group of Peaceforcers whom you plan to ambush."
"That's correct." Johnny? Anything on this one?
... No. Or the SpaceFarer either. But they're filed for future reference.
The young man nodded. He said gently, "It seems to many of my colleagues--well, excessive concern for what is, after all, the welfare of officers of the PKF."
"We're not killing anybody," said Trent. He stared at the handsome young man. "Nobody. You want to kill Peaceforcers, fine. But you do it on your own time."
The man shrugged, leaned back in his seat without expression. He sat watching Trent, like all the others. "Merely a suggestion."
"Well," said Norman Shelton. "I think that about covers it. We're in."
Trent stood, slowly, and leaned across the table. "What?"
Shelton said again, "We're in. We'll fund it. Frankly I think you've underpriced yourself, but that's really your problem."
Trent kept his voice under tight control. "I've been kept waiting here at Bessel for four days, denied access to a full-sensory InfoNet terminal, until you folks could assemble yourself in one place, so that we could have this very important meeting. This was it, was it? The whole meeting? I just want to make sure I didn't miss anything."
"Possibly you have missed something." It was the first time Belinda Singer had spoken. Her voice was strong, the voice of a woman used to decades of obedience. "Do you recognize me, young man?"
"Should I?"
It was impressive how much sharpness she managed to put into a sentence that was phrased politely. "Answer my question, please."
"Yes. You're Belinda Singer."
"Fine," she said briskly. "Then we can forget this crap about not knowing each other's names. You're Trent Castanaveras."
Trent did not look away from the old woman's gaze. "A lot of people seem to think so."
"The last time I spoke to Malko Kalharri," said Belinda Singer, "was about two weeks before he died. He and Doctor Montignet were both worried about you."
Trent's voice was totally empty. "That's nice. You know they're dead."
"It was on the Boards."
"Maybe they should have been worrying more about themselves. I'm still alive. They're not."
Belinda Singer said simply, "Young man, why are you doing this?"
"The boost?"
"Yes," she said gently. "The boost."
"I'm getting paid."
She snorted. "Bullshit."
"I'm getting paid a lot."
"Bullshit again." Singer picked up her handheld, turned it so that its holofield faced Trent. "Half a million. I make your expenses at somewhere around two hundred thousand, maybe as high as two and a quarter. You're left with an upside of between two-seventy-five and three hundred." She locked gazes with Trent. "I had a very trustworthy associate run a probability analysis of this undertaking. These are rough figures. Your chance of walking out of the DataWatch Farside facility in one piece is about twenty-five percent. Fifty percent capture, followed by execution. Twenty-five percent you die inside before getting captured. I know a bit about you, boy. You've given almost 350,000 CU to the World Food Bank in your short life. People who can give away that sort of Credit to charity are rarely willing to put their lives at serious risk simply to acquire a similar amount."
Her figures were close to those Trent had worked out with Johnny Johnny. "So?"
"So," said Belinda Singer, "unless I get a straight answer out of you, I'm going to pull out. If I pull out I can pretty much guarantee you no SpaceFarer craft in the Collective is going to agree to do the pickup you need."
"Why is it relevant?"
Belinda Singer closed her eyes for a moment, sat motionlessly and took a slow breath. When she opened her eyes again she said, "Trent, humor me. I'm a cranky old woman and smart-ass answers make me even crankier. Malko Kalharri was one of the dearest friends I ever had, and on his behalf I feel a certain reluctance to let you waste your life casually. Calling what you're talking about doing here a--boost, I believe the word is?--calling it a boost is like saying a laser cannon is useful for starting the fireplace."
It took Trent a moment to decipher the comment--he had never actually seen a fireplace that burned wood--but when he did, he could not suppress a chuckle. "Point. Can we speak privately?"
Without glancing away from Trent, Belinda Singer said, "You can leave." They were alone within thirty seconds.
Trent reached forward, turned off his handheld, and waited. After a moment, Belinda Singer did the same. Trent nodded. "Thank you. I swept for bugs before the meeting. There are two, but they're recording the sounds Mayor Noas makes in his bathtub. It's not pretty." He looked down for a moment at the tabletop, ordering his thoughts. His fingernails needed trimming. "We've met, you know."
"Really?" Singer actually looked surprised. "When?"
"I don't remember exactly. Early 2062. You visited the Chandler Complex after the Eighth Amendment was signed, before the Complex was destroyed."
Singer looked troubled. "That's odd. My memory is actually quite good. I remember that trip--wait."
Trent said, "Your floatchair broke."
The old woman pointed a finger at Trent. "You were the little boy who fixed my floatchair! I remember you now. We didn't get introduced."
Trent shrugged. "You were being--" He paused, said, "Cranky."
Amazingly, Singer actually colored slightly. "I remember that, too. Being around so many of those little telepaths--it made me nervous."
"It made everyone nervous," Trent said precisely. "That's why they were killed."
"Yes," Singer said slowly. "I guess there's some truth in that." She shook the bad memories away with a visible effort. "Let's get back to business. I'm sure you realize by now the reason you were made to wait four days was so I could talk to you."
"That's obvious."
"I am willing," the old woman said clearly, "to see you die if it buys the destruction of the LINK. Assuming you die at Jules Verne, and I think it likely, I really have no problem with advancing you your quarter million CU." She made a deprecating gesture. "It's mostly my money you'll be spending. But it's a good investment. I think your chances of surviving this operation are poor--but my staff gives me odds of better than two-thirds that the LINK goes down
. Taking the Lunar InfoNet away from DataWatch ..." She was silent for a moment. "I can't even estimate what that's worth. Short term, hundreds of millions of CU in increased trade with Free Luna. Long term ..." Her voice trailed off, and she sat looking at Trent.
Trent actually smiled. "Unfortunately, there's this terrible possibility I might survive."
"If you survive this stunt," she said quietly, "the Secretary General's office is going to request that you be handed over to the Unification. They may very well threaten war if you're not handed over. No matter how pleased the Collective turns out to be at what you've done--and make no mistake, they'll be pleased--most of them won't be willing to risk war to protect someone who likes to tell people he's a thief. Even if he's a good thief. Unless there is some level of mutual commitment, extending beyond this one boost, I would guess, Trent, that the Collective will indeed give you to the PKF when it's all over."
Trent sat motionlessly, thinking, considering his options. There weren't many.
"You're in high stakes territory, young man. If you survive this, Trent, you'll need us to protect you for, I don't know, the next several years at least. It would be in your best interests," said Belinda Singer gently, "to make sure that the Collective needs you as well."
"Why am I doing this."
"It does come down to that, doesn't it?"
Trent found that his mouth was very dry. "It's a lengthy explanation."
"Trim it a bit, then. I'm an old woman, I'd hate to die on you just when it gets good."
"When I was young," Trent began.
Belinda Singer smothered a laugh, waved a hand at Trent. "Sorry. Go on."
Trent glared at her. "I used to admire the PKF."
"A lot of us did."
"Shut up. You want to bare your soul, you wait until I'm done. I used to admire the PKF." He paused, waited for her to say something, and when she did not he continued. "When I was younger. There are still individual Peaceforcers I admire. The problem's not with the people; most Peaceforcers are honorable, doing their jobs as well as they're able within the boundaries of the laws they're sworn to serve. A lot of the laws are bad laws, and most of the policies are bad policies. When I was a part of society, back on Earth, I spent a fair amount of Credit funding lobbyists, to try to get some of those laws and policies changed. And then they pushed me outside and I couldn't keep doing that. I ran." He swept a hand around the room. "I ended up here. And I was almost willing to let it go. I wanted revenge, and I still do, and I'll have it--but I wasn't seriously planning to try for the LINK.
"Then a squad of Peaceforcers killed a friend of mine. They let out his air and shot him with masers. He died in horrible pain. And I want revenge for that, too, and I'll have it."
Belinda Singer was nodding, quietly, without any trace of emotion that Trent could detect. "So that's it. I think--"
"That's not it."
She lifted an eyebrow in surprise. "No?"
"When I was eight years old I decided I was an atheist. When I was ten I became an existentialist. Most Players are. But when you dismiss God and decide there's nothing in the universe to rely on but yourself, you have to find some way to bring meaning to your life. When I was ten years old I decided I was going to change the world. Improve it. Make it a better place." She was watching him carefully, weighing each word. "The Unification," said Trent, "is going bad. It's been going bad for a long time. I wanted to fix it from the inside, but I can't do that any longer. Maybe I never could and I was kidding myself."
"So?"
"I wanted to make a difference when I was ten, Belinda." It was the first time he had called her by name, and he saw her notice it. "I still do."
Belinda Singer nodded, accepting it. "I still need to hear you say it, Trent."
Trent took a deep breath. He felt vaguely sick, as though the world were blurring around him. There was a remote ringing in his ears; there were butterflies in his stomach, army butterflies on a three-day leave. His voice sounded as though it did not belong to him. "We must bring down the Unification. It is time to bring it down."
Later, when the ringing in his ears had faded into quiet, when the trembling in his shoulders had ceased, he looked up and saw Belinda Singer watching him with a grave expression. "That was hard, wasn't it?"
He whispered the word. "Yes."
"You have to trust people in this life, Trent. We all do." She was silent a beat. "The hell of it is, it keeps getting harder."
The guard at the entrance to the cubicle, a man dressed in much the same almost-uniform that Domino had worn, except that his was brown rather than scarlet, said, "Twenty minutes."
Closing the door of the cubicle behind him, Trent seated himself behind the wrap-around control console. Surveying the board before him, Trent began making attachments. He jacked his handheld into the board; the MRI helmet went over his head, all the way down to his shoulders. Inside the helmet, headphones extruded themselves and clamped over his ears; laser projectors focused themselves on each eye.
There was a brief moment of disorientation as the terminal went online.
The MRI imaging sensors came alive, setting up a strong magnetic field that polarized those nuclei in Trent's brain that possessed net magnetic charge. A second and weaker magnetic field, applied at right angles to the first, caused the nuclei to tip into new positions, emitting a radio signal in the process. Millions of radio nanoreceptors in the full-sensory traceset fed into a limited expert system whose only function was to trace correspondences in Trent's thought processes with known thought processes. It was a slow procedure; on Trent's vanished full-sensory on Earth, which had a functional map of Trent's internal nerve-net, the link had been nearly instantaneous. Here, on hardware that did not know how Trent thought, it took most of a minute before the first flicker of the Crystal Wind reached him.
Johnny Johnny said softly, Hi, Boss.
Hi, Johnny.
Gonna dance?
Yes.
About time.
They joined together; Johnny Johnny reached out, found the first step to the Free Luna InfoNet--
Johnny Johnny threw himself into the Net, and moved outward. The Datawatch controlled Lunar InfoNet itself was forbidden him, but that still left--
--the Lunar telexchange, used for voice and data communications to and from orbit by Free Luna and U.N. Luna alike. Johnny Johnny attached tracers to all communications, waiting for something that was headed upward. Free Luna had a population of three and a half million; less than a fiftieth of a second had passed when Johnny Johnny found what he was looking for, a message heading up to the PKF orbital satellites. A PKF spy, almost certainly; Johnny Johnny diverted the message back into the telexchange and took the diverted message package's place, flowing out to a microwave relay that beamed up into the PKF satellites. There were others using the relay, but Johnny Johnny needed as much of its capacity as he could get; he took over all the empty lines, and then began freezing lines as other users finished and released them. It was done delicately enough, slowly enough, that Watchdog would probably not notice it.
In multiple channels Johnny Johnny leaped upward.
His retreat was reasonably secure, over two hundred channels in every relay, a series of relays left open at the telexchange. Inside the comsat, Johnny Johnny waited again. He did not touch anything. Significant realworld time passed while he waited, nearly two seconds before a PKF slipship orbiting over Farside was sent a recreational poker program. Johnny Johnny broke into it, increasing the signal complexity, injecting a pared-down version of himself into the signal progression at a one-hundred-to-one ratio. The noise level was acceptable, and the signal went through. Slowly, over the course of seconds, Johnny Johnny found himself inside the Peaceforcer slipship.
Johnny Johnny took momentary control of the onboard computer; he located L-5 and sent a distress call to it through the orbiting slipship. (Onboard, the Peaceforcer noted a momentary blurriness in the simulated stud she was playing poker with.)
Spacebase One responded to the emergency distress call, opening a wide maser channel to the affected ship. Johnny Johnny informed Spacebase One that he was the program in control of the slipship, that he was experiencing traumatic equipment failure, and that he was not certain that his own integrity was assured. He requested aid from Spacebase One's diagnostics to determine what steps to take.
For a long moment Johnny Johnny did not think it was going to work.
Then the diagnostic routines at Spacebase One requested that the damaged slipship beam its control program back to Spacebase One for examination. A high-bandwidth comm laser touched the slipship, and Johnny Johnny poured through the connection, froze it open behind him, and ate the diagnostics program at Spacebase One.
The diagnostics program had access to Spacebase One's comm facilities. Johnny Johnny took a dozen nanoseconds, redirected the satellite to lase directly at Spacebase One, cutting the slipship out of the link. He delved further then, identified the program in use as the Communications Manager, and identified all of the resources that were available to the Manager.
And crashed them.
Every comm channel in Spacebase One, external and internal.
Two seconds passed before anyone even noticed, an eternal six before anything was done about it. A human webdancer in the Operations Information Center at the core of Spacebase One crossed the interface and dove into the Crystal Wind. She did not notice Johnny Johnny, sitting silently in the darkness. The problem was immediately obvious, if unexpected; the Communications Manager had crashed itself. She requested access to Main Storage so that she might invest a new communications manager; the request was received, processed, granted, and she fell into the core.
With Johnny Johnny right behind her.
The file Security Manager, a passive observer that functioned largely as an alarm, politely informed Johnny Johnny that there were three Access Levels available, only one of which Johnny Johnny was authorized to access freely. Level One was a sieve; Johnny Johnny flashed through it in seconds. The name he sought (even his biological component did not consciously think the word Trent) was nowhere to be found, so he sought a higher level.
The Long Run Page 28