Marksman looked at him questioningiy. “Why not?”
“The Design Center’s main computer system was scheduled to be down for maintenance tonight.” The news had been posted on the morning update. The designers would be gone, but the corporation’s real maintenance techs would be hard at work on the other side of the door. If the runners barged in on the Telestrian work team, they would have more hostages. Or worse—if somebody on either side panicked, Shamgar might get his way and there’d be corpses, maybe Andy’s among them.
“You want an inside connection to the Telestrian net, right? I know another place where you can hook in. There won’t be anybody there.”
“That so?” Marksman asked.
Andy nodded solemnly. It was. At least he’d take them where no one else would get hurt.
Unfortunately, the runners didn’t believe him. Marksman swiped the card through the reader. The door hissed open on a dark and deserted room.
The Design Center was dark, uninhabited.
“We’re the scheduled fix-it team.” Marksman said.
The runners moved inside swiftly. Shamgar went to the other door, a sentry. Beatty remained in the tech corridor as he had done before. Rags selected one of the cyberdeck stations and dragged a black box out of his satchel. Opening a side panel, he revealed a cradle into which he put the workstation’s phone handset. He jacked the cyberdeck into the box, leaned over his apparatus, and whispered, “Yates?”
“Good link.” the box said.
“Make it fast, Yates.” Marksman said.
“Lightning is slow.” the box said. “I’m gone.”
Almost a minute passed before the box began to curse. “Problem?” Marksman asked anxiously.
“This place is iced in heavy.” Ice, slang for IC or Intrusion Countermeasures, was defensive programming. The nastiest forms could fry a decker’s synapses. “Frag it to hell, I’m locked! I—”
Their decker had clearly run into serious trouble. One by one the runners turned to look at Andy. He could see it in their faces, especially Shamgar’s—they were blaming him for trapping their decker.
>LIVE FEED COVERAGE -[2 2:54:55/8-14-55]
REPORTER: TAYLOR WEJNGARTNER [WEIN-324]
UPLINK SITE: ARLINGTON DISTRICT, FDC
Weingartner: “A.S you can see behind me, all is not peaceful here among the teats of the Compensation Army. Moments ago a scuffle broke out between police and some of the demonstrators. I’m not sure what this sudden violence was about, but it was serious. The blue-beret woman I spoke to earlier tonight has been carried away on an improvised stretcher. That woman claimed to be on an errand of mercy; now it seems that the quality of mercy hereabouts is somewhat strained.
“What a minute. Christian Randolph, self-proclaimed general of the Comp Army, has just arrived on the scene.
“Mr. Randolph, Mr. Randolph!”
Randolph: “Yes?”
Weingartner: “Taylor Weingartner, WFDC. Tell me, sir. A woman who earlier this evening identified herself as a member of Conscience of the Country was injured at the heart of the scuffle. Do you think this fight has anything to do with your blue-beret soldiers?”
Randolph: “My blue berets? What are you talking about?”
Weingartner: “Are you denying that the Conscience of the Country is connected to your Comp Army?”
Randolph: “Without knowing exactly what you’re talking about, all I can say is that I came here to DeeCee to see justice done. I have nothing but open arms for anyone of a like mind. If the people you’re talking about are here for that reason, if they are due compensation, then they are by definition a part of our Army.”
Weingartner: “So you condone the violence they appear to have instigated.”
Randolph: “You know that’s not what the Army’s about. We do not now, nor will we ever, resort to violence to achieve our just demands.”<<<<<
6
“Yates is in trouble. Ice has got a hook on him.” Rags sounded worried.
“Tell him to cut and run if he needs to.” Marksman said. “I told you the geek hosed us.” Shamgar said. “We oughta cut and run ourselves.”
“Yates isn’t down yet.” Marksman said.
“The ice is black.” Rags’s morose expression was growing bleaker.
From Andy’s excursions into the shadownet, he’d heard that Telestrian used black ice, the kind that could kill an unauthorized decker. He hadn’t really believed it. So much of what passed back and forth on the net was just noise. But the troll sounded sure. And if he was right—
Andy didn’t mind playing with black ice in his shadow-running fantasies, but the real thing not only scared him, it made him angry. He’d never understood how a corporation—or anybody, for that matter—could justify using that kind of deadly force just because somebody was trespassing on their cyberturf.
If Yates was tangling with black ice, his synapses could be frying. So why were the runners standing around debating? Their decker was in trouble in the Matrix. Didn’t they know how fast things moved in the cyberspace? Yates could already be fried.
“Aren’t you going to help him?”
“Nothing we can do, kid.” Marksman said. “None of us are deckers.”
“I’ve decked.” Andy said. Had he really said that?
“Are you saying that you want to help?” Marksman sounded a little surprised and a lot suspicious.
“He’ll jack in and squeal.” Shamgar said. “We’ll be wearing corpcops before his butt has a chance to warm the chair.”
“No I won’t.” Andy said. Leastwise not until he was sure Yates was safe from any black ice. And by then Andy would be in the Telestrian net, and there wouldn’t be anything the runners could do to stop him from alerting security.
“Yates needs help.” Rags said.
“I know, I know.” Marksman said.
“You can’t just let him fry.” Andy said. “I mean, I don’t have a lot of experience, but I might be able to do something. I could at least try.”
“Get us all fried.” Shamgar said.
“What about Yates?” Rags asked.
“He knew the risk.” Shamgar said.
“That’s not very loyal.” Andy said.
“What the frag would you know about loyalty, geek?” Shamgar snapped.
Andy thought the ork was going to jump him, but Rags shifted, shielding Andy with his bulk. The troll was looking at something behind Andy.
“Can we trust him?”
“Trust him.” the woman said. Andy hadn’t seen Kit come back, but when he turned his head she was sitting on one of the workstations, long pale legs tucked underneath her. She smiled at him, but her eyes were distant.
“You sure, Kit?” Marksman asked.
“He wears the corporate brand, but he does not show the corporate heart.” She shrugged. “Life is never utterly sure. Is that not part of life’s charm?”
“All right, kid. We’ll give you a chance.” Marksman said. Shamgar growled, but Marksman ignored him. “You cross us, Shamgar gets you. You call corp security in on us, there’ll be nothing they can do fast enough to stop Shamgar from shredding you. You don’t strike me as ready to give your life for Telestrian Cyberdyne. You’ve got too much ahead of you. Don’t you, kid?”
Andy nodded, because it was easier to agree. He was really getting tired of the way Marksman called him “kid.” but now wasn’t the time to complain.
“You think you can help Yates, you do it.” Marksman said. “Just remember, we’ll be watching. Anything goes bad. Rags will know. Understand?”
Andy wasn’t sure he believed that, but he said, “I understand.”
While Rags set up a link with his black box, Andy sat down at one of the workstations, settling himself in the recliner. He slid the cover back from the keyboard and input suite. Light glinted cold and wan on the datacord plug as he pulled the connection from its housing.
This was real shadowrunning stuff, not some virtuality imitation. He was about to go de
cking against black ice. Hadn’t he always dreamed of living the life of a shadowrunner?
Well, no. not always. He remembered when he’d first become fascinated by the idea. He’d just taken a dare and decked into the shadownet. There he’d heard of “famous” runners like Sam Verner, the Seattle-based runner rumored to be the first since Howling Coyote to raise and control the power of the Great Ghost Dance. The freedom and power the runners enjoyed had seemed seductive.
When Andy learned that Verner too had started as a corporate geek, he’d been inspired. If Verner had broken free of the corporate world and become a shadowrunner, Andy was sure he was capable of doing the same. For a month or so afterwards, he’d worn leathers, fringed like he saw in the West Coast fashion fac-files, and had gotten really deep into the shaman stuff. Trance dram chips, fetishes, meditation chips, dream catchers, Indian legend chips. He’d even gotten himself a Narcoject pistol like the one Verner was supposed to carry. It wasn’t a real Narcoject—he couldn’t afford the carry permit, but his corporate affiliation did let him possess a non-functional replica—but the logo-inscribed butt sticking out of a genuine Nauga-leather fast-draw holster added a real frosty touch to his look.
When he wasn’t strutting his stuff down at the Landover Mall or the Telestrian Plaza Dome, he’d spent hours alone in his room, running the chips and opening himself to the universe, waiting for the spirit visions. He never did have any. All he’d gotten was a lot of grief from his older sisters. He’d been so embarrassed that he’d given up the vision quest thing and gone back to his studies, but less than a month later he’d started his virtual running.
And now, sitting at the cyberdeck workstation he’d chosen, he wasn’t playing a game anymore.
It was a magic moment, though not the sort a shaman like Verner did. Andy’s magic was the metaphorical magic of technomancy. His early test scores showed that. If he had a totem spirit, it had to be the Ghost in the Machine. The magic of rigging, where a man became one with his machine, was Andy’s path to enlightenment and the wonder of decking, where anything you thought could be real. Virtually real, anyway.
Almost as real as the ork breathing down his neck. Andy snugged the cord home into his datajack and poised his hands over the input surface. The moment of truth. He stabbed a finger down on the Engage button, made a fast trip through the identification protocols, accessed his own Matrix management files, launched his persona program, and—
A shining exoskeletal man-shaped robot, identical to the ultimate form of Exterminator T-2050, stood beneath the electron skies. The machine terror wore only a dark leather jacket whose back glowed with a great red neon “C” and a smaller blue neon superscript “3.” Passing data pulses splashed light against the exterminator’s chrome skull as its red-lit ocular units scanned the cyberspace horizon.
Andy suppressed the ominous music that accompanied each move the exterminator made. Despite his icon’s appearance, he was no killer decker. This was no pretend foray into the Matrix; here and now, the audio conceit seemed foolish. Besides, it used processing power he might need.
He felt a tug and understood it to be directions, fed in through Rags’s black box. Andy went with the flow, moving through the Matrix sky on boot jets of flame like an armored superhero. The landscape below him changed from the normal black void and scattered lights of system icons, connected by pulsing data streams, to a deep violet. The lights retained their characteristic shapes, but the icons were dimmed, as if they were wrapped in some protective, translucent fabric. Letters began to appear in the air before him, scrolling along into words: “Your clearance is inadequate. You stand in danger of violating a Telestrian Cyberdyne secure matrix zone. Desist. If you do not, your intrusion will be met with deadly force. You have been warned.”
Andy launched his best sleaze routine and hoped. He was a user in the Telestrian system and his legitimate codes gave him a leg up that an outside decker wouldn’t have. But was it enough?
It seemed so. Nothing came to gobble him up.
Urged forward, Andy focused on a datastore. That was his destination. He eased through the gate and was confronted by a battle in progress. A Telestrian executive icon struggled with a figure in golden armor with the Telestrian logo etched into the breastplate. From Rags’s feed, Andy knew that the exec wasn’t legit, but simply Yates’s disguise. Until now Andy had never seen anything like the knight icon, which looked like something out of The Legend of Excalibur, but he knew that it was Telestrian and it was an intrusion countermeasure. Just being in the same Matrix location with it, he could feel the program’s power—the full mainframe, he guessed, which meant that there was a lot of computer behind it.
The knight icon had an open-faced helmet and the visage that showed in the opening looked carved of the darkest onyx, black as night, black as the blackest ice. Yates and the knight were locked hand-to-hand, and it looked as if the knight was beginning to overpower the decker. Hoping he wasn’t being really stupid, Andy materialized his exterminator’s multi-phase pulse rifle and pumped plasma into the knight.
Andy’s attack program didn’t even make the knight icon flicker, but it did cause the knight to turn its dark face in his direction. The knight’s baleful eyes promised destruction. Andy felt very, very stupid.
But apparently the distraction was all Yates needed. The decker surged against the knight, throwing it off balance.
Then he struck, in a series of martial arts moves that blurred his icon. Andy didn’t quite see what happened, but one second the knight was a threat and the next, it was staggering back, its armor disarticulating. The shed pieces, along with whatever they might have contained, shriveled into floating shreds of ash. Last to go was the knight’s head, which seemed to be trying to say something as it crinkled and shrank.
“Tough bastard.” Yates turned to Andy and looked him up and down. “Thanks, stranger.”
“Null perspiration.” Andy lied. The thought of going against the black ice had most certainly made him sweat. Not that he would notice or feel it here in the Matrix.
“Hey, you’re running a Telestrian ID. Who the hell are you, and why the hell did you help me against that ice?” Andy couldn’t take his eyes off the flaking remains of the knight. “The knight. It really was black ice, wasn’t it?”
“Blacker than a corp auditor’s heart. You didn’t answer my questions.”
“Sorry. My handle’s C-Cubed.”
That’s what the C3 on the jacket was all about, but Andy wasn’t about to tell this decker or anyone else what it stood for. Nobody really had to know it stood for Cruncher’s Cybernetic Cub, a tag his sister Asa had stuck him with while setting Andy up for his first foray into the Matrix. She’d locked the handle in on his terminal, and by the time Andy had learned enough to break the lock, he’d gotten used to the tag. His rep in the Matrix might not be great, but he didn’t really want to start all over again under a new name. “That’s one, but it don’t cover why.”
“Your friends sent me. Rags helped me find you.”
“Yeah? Well, okay. Thanks again, Cee.”
Yates stuck out a hand and Andy reached out automatically to grasp it. He felt a shock on contact and the Matrix blurred for a nanosecond. Andy hadn’t experienced direct contact in the Matrix before; the buzz that the physical sensation put in his head surprised him a little. Yates smiled, pumping the exterminator’s multi-digit manipulator with a firm and controlling grip.
“I haven’t glommed what I came for yet. Since Rags and the crew sent you, you probably want to help me prowl around.”
He really didn’t. Saving someone from black ice was one thing, helping with a data theft was another. “I don’t know what you’re looking for.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t say I know exactly either, but I’ll know it when I see it. But I think maybe you might shorten the search. Your codes say you’re a test driver, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to show me where you launch from?”
“I
guess.” Andy showed him. He knew he shouldn’t, but it seemed the right thing to do at the moment. Yates wasn’t such a bad guy, and Andy had always liked showing off. He opened the ready room for the test drivers, although he was a little embarrassed by the old-fashioned ambiance of the iconographic representation. The place was supposed to look like a mid-twentieth-century fighter squadron’s headquarters, or so Russ said. The filing cabinets were awfully low-tech imagery to impress a cutting-edge decker like Yates. Still, the Montjoy files seemed to impress him. Yates pulled and perused a few, dropping several into a briefcase that appeared and floated at his side. He came to Andy’s control file and looked up.
“Say, you’re the one who was flying the other prototype, aren’t you?”
Realizing that Yates had to be the stranger he’d been chasing during his Montjoy test run, Andy said, “Yeah.”
“Not bad flying, Cee.”
The praise gave Andy a thrill. And why not? Yates was a real shadowrunning decker, and a good one, yet Andy had managed to impress him. It was no small feat. He managed to stammer out “Thanks.”
Yates prowled around the virtual room some more, poking into every datastore. It took him a while, but he didn’t waste any time either. More than once he added files to his briefcase. Andy knew he ought to protest the theft. In fact, he started to several times, but each time he did his persona program started to glitch; by the time he got it under control, the urgency to act had passed.
“Time to go.” Yates said. “Don’t worry, Cee. I wiped the tracks your entry codes left.”
That was when the full weight of what was happening hit Andy. It was his codes that had gotten them in, his codes that would be linked with the data theft. Telestrian would see him as the thief.
That was also when the black-faced knight in golden armor materialized in front of them.
This knight had more ornate and more complicated armor than the first. The knight stretched a gauntleted hand toward Andy, a seemingly pointless move from where he stood more than an arm’s length away. But as the armored fist moved, a flaming sword appeared, reaching out for the exterminator’s cranium-torso flexor junction. Andy was too slow to dodge.
Just Compensation Page 6