This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  Hsing. Ra. Varsav. Kent.

  They were not rivals for power, not in the traditional sense. Chandras Delhi had already reached the highest station that any human—save the Prima herself—might attain. Yet power might be lost. Only two hundred and twenty nodes existed in outspace, each with its resident Guildmaster. It wasn’t a large number, when one considered the thousands of Guildfolk who fought for such an appointment, and those just beneath her were constantly seeking the chink in her armor that would allow them to unseat her. As for the other Guildmasters ... they always bore watching. Her station at Serpent’s Reach was a plum assignment, situated at the midpoint of several major trade routes, and she knew the others coveted it. She could taste how badly they wanted it, knew in her soul that a single mistake—even a fleeting moment of weakness—might find her rendering up her passcodes to a stranger, so that another might move in.

  Hsing, Varsov, Kent, Ra. They all had stations of their own; not the equal of hers perhaps, but valuable in their own right. So there would be no competition from that end. Indeed, they probably expended as much energy guarding their own positions as she did with her own. Ra was not someone she feared; the woman was shallow, obsessed with her own pleasures, and was unlikely to be involved in the kind of political intrigue that Delhi and the others thrived on. Delhi kept a watchful eye on Ra’s affairs, but expected no surprises. Kent had been a shell of a man since his accident, but a keen wit still lay coiled within that tormented soul, and people who underestimated him did so at their own risk. She did not intend to. Varsav ... that man was a lit fuse, and there was no telling what might set him off, but he was a brilliant strategist, and his attention to detail made him doubly dangerous. People like that sometimes sensed the webwork in which she had bound them, and if they struggled hard enough and long enough they could damage the delicate strands of data which she used to control them. As for Hsing ... the man was a capable adversary, and normally she watched him closely, but he had been away from his station for a year now. By the time he returned, there would be a dozen underlings vying for his seat, each with his own private plot to steal the mastership. It would take all his energy to consolidate his position and undo what damage those absent months had fostered. So she did not fear Hsing. Not yet.

  Did they fear her?

  She knew that Kent did. Kent was a creature of fear, and even the flood of chemicals in his bloodstream—she had a full accounting of it, the gem of her secret intelligence—could not negate the emotion entirely. She knew that his own dark senses had tested the borders of her domain, and she had not turned away all his efforts. Better to know where the enemy was, and feed him the data you wanted him to have, then to send him back into the nameless darkness to plan a better assault. Because the next one you might not catch....

  Her brainware flashed an alert: incoming shipment. She signaled it to go ahead and let the symbols of its efforts scroll upward in her field of vision. It was a data capsule, hijacked from Reijik Station. She keyed it to open, took a brief look at the coded contents, and then shunted it over to her decryption experts. She noted the cost of transmission—not cheap, but then, hijacked data never was—and flashed an icon to confirm that payment would be made. It wasn’t necessary for her to visualize instructions to have her account debited the proper amount, or to see that it was forwarded to the proper agent. Nor was it necessary for her to oversee the process which disguised the payment as something else, so that an unexpected audit would not reveal illicit business. All of that was automatic, programmed deep into the recesses of her brainware and the living cells that surrounded it. Such methods were as much a part of her as breathing.

  With a sigh of satisfaction she flashed a series of icons to her brainware, and the plasteel cage that supported her body began to move. She could have had her brain repaired long ago so that her body moved of its own accord, without the need for mechanical support, but there was risk in that; the same techniques which would reroute the neural pathways in search of more efficient cellular combinations might also do damage to the delicate systems she relied upon for thought. A woman from some other planet might have risked that, preferring to sacrifice a few fleeting thoughts rather than spend her life encased in this mechanized carapace, but no Gueran ever would. The legacy of Guera was in the minds and souls of her people, and like all her people, Chandras Delhi revered the human brain in its natural form. If the cost was to her body, so be it; she was a creature of mind, not flesh, and would willingly bear the sacrifice.

  Reijik Station, she thought. That was one of the nodes that served the motherworld, Earth. There were some on her staff who felt she was mad to focus as much energy as she did on that forgotten planet, but that was because they didn’t see the universe as she did. Earth was so finely wrapped in datalines that it appeared as a white cocoon to her inner senses: a network so closely tangled that only rarely did an outsider manage to pull loose a thread and examine it. Few bothered to try. To most Guerans, Earth was a waste of space and history, too tied up in its own internal politics to ever become meaningful in the larger sense. Those Guerans who did pay attention to their evolutionary motherworld generally did so with resentment. Earth was, after all, the homeworld of nine billion “true” humans, and the focal point of five billion more. Or so they called themselves. Humans whose ancestors had stayed at home while the colonists of Guera and Yin and Frisia went forth to claim the galaxy ... and now they dared to feel superior to their Hausman cousins, and to flaunt that superiority at every turn.

  In truth, Delhi mused, if Earth had been closer to an ainniq, there would probably have been war long ago. The Variant worlds were united in very little, but their hatred of Earth was a rallying point. Shortsighted fools. Just as the primordial melange of Earth’s ancient oceans had once provided nature with the raw materials for life, so would its crowded datasphere now provide the spawning ground for new forms of technology, new gems of data, new dangers ... she was alone in feeling that Earth had such promise, but that didn’t bother her. Few watched the human homeworld as she did, which meant there were fewer rivals for her harvests. Her predations.

  Reijik Station, she mused. Her fingers twitched in their plasteel cage as she wondered what manner of feast this harvest might provide.

  “Damn it to hell,” Stivan cursed.

  His coworker looked up from the control panel where his own attentions were focused. “What’s that, Stiv?”

  “Nothing.” His voice was a growl. “Nothing at all.”

  Line after line of code scrolled up on the monitor. You had to look at hijacked material like that—on a monitor—and you had to shut your brainware down, too, because you never knew when there was some kind of security virus embedded in that mess that would fry your circuitry as soon as it got into your head. Okay, so that was the job. He understood it, and accepted the whole thing. But this shit was encrypted out the wazoo. His decryption programs were sending him signals he had never seen before, and the only references he had on such things were in his own head.

  “Shit.” He struck the control panel in frustration and at last turned away from the monitor. One deep breath. Two. Take it in, hold it for a six-count, let it out. He’d made enough mistakes when his temper was short that he’d finally programmed his brainware not to accept the start-up icon unless he was calm—which was fine in theory, but a royal pain in the ass when he needed access to something quickly. Like now.

  At last he guessed that he had reached the point where his internal monitors would be satisfied with the key readings—pulse rate, blood pressure, skin conductivity—and he envisioned the start-up icon. It was a red dragon on a black background, very dramatic. He had based it upon a tattoo he had once seen as a child, that had stuck in his mind ever since. It was complex and hard to envision properly—he’d programmed his head so that any line more than a nano out of place would cause the whole icon to fail—but that was for security. Stivan Dici was obsessed with security. Little wonder, since his primary job was to brea
k down the security of other systems.

  It took him three tries—apparently his blood pressure was still a bit too high, and he had to wait it out—but at last he was back in operation. The decryption data was in part of his permanent storage array, nestled against the inside of his ventricular wall. The information took up a large chunk of his permanent memory, but it was well worth the sacrifice. What was he going to do with his brainware otherwise, store viddies for replay?

  With a spare headset he downloaded the information he needed, then wiped the headset clean immediately. With data like this, you didn’t take chances. He’d put over thirty years into accumulating information on rare and alien encryption techniques, which was why he was one of the highest-paid hackers in existence. Of course, that could only take you so far....

  He tried not to think about that, as he set up his remote processor to deal with the new input. He tried really hard not to be impatient ... but it was hard. Talent such as his was destined for bigger and better things, and although he knew his chance would come eventually, it irked him that no opportunity had come yet. Oh, sure, the Guildmistress lavished gifts upon him for his many services to her, and his coworkers all regarded him with something midway between admiration and awe. He could taste it while he worked with them, and he played up to it whenever he could.

  “Well, what have we here?” he would mutter, as he entered the encryption office, “Another capsule from Danylon?” And his coworkers would look at him in stunned amazement, wondering how he needed no more than a glance to assess the chaos of foreign symbols which they had struggled with for hours. He loved that moment. He loved it even more because it was all showmanship, nothing more. Long ago he had wormed his secretive way into his Mistress’ own private datalines, and could pluck a single fact from them so delicately that her security alarms never stirred. Of course, that was in part because he himself had designed her whole security system....

  Yes, he was living in a hacker’s paradise, no doubt about it. Paid an immense wage to rape the galaxy of its most secret data, and festooned with Guild status for it. It should have been enough. It would have surely been, for any other code hack. But it wasn’t.

  He wanted the station.

  She was only two ranks above him, in the hierarchy of Guild service. And he knew that you could skip a step or two if the Guild Prima wanted you badly enough. No man of his profession had ever gained a guildmastership, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. For a man who had broken the war code of Termillian and hijacked pirates’ freight on Paradise, let’s face it, there were few challenges left.

  Ironically, the one thing that could vault him into the higher reaches of Guild power was the same thing his Mistress had hired him to find. Data. He didn’t know what he was looking for exactly, or how it would work, but he knew it was out there, his golden goose. Data that would threaten to topple the Guild—or strengthen it—so that the Prima must have it, or all would suffer. There would be rewards aplenty for the one who brought her that little tidbit, and Delhi was perfectly positioned to do so. And he was perfectly positioned to steal it from her when it came in.

  “What do you want for this?” the Prima would ask in her dulcet tones, to which he would casually respond, “Well, my talents seem wasted where I am, perhaps I should move up to a higher level....” And if she talked about raising him one level in rank, he would politely point out that one who had saved the Guild itself surely deserved better, perhaps—dare he suggest?—a station of his own....

  And it had to be Delhi’s, of course. If he didn’t take that woman down, and take her down hard, she would make him pay for such a betrayal. But if she lost her own status at the same time that he gained his, so the facilities of the Guild were no longer hers to command ... it would be hard for him to manage, but it could be done. It had to be done. Her network was too vast, too perfectly managed, for him to play rival to it. It must be neutralized, if he was to come into his own.

  After all, he thought to her, we play the same game, you and I. And there can only be one who writes the rules.

  But first, he must have the data.

  With a second glance to make sure the headset had really, really been wiped clean—he was compulsive about such things, which was part of the reason for his success—he started to scan the mysterious data packet one more time. So many instructions had been added to his decryption program now that its action was noticeably slower, and he tapped his stylus on the console restlessly as he waited it out. If he’d been on the big machines this wouldn’t be happening, but you didn’t work on hijacked data with any machine you valued. Just last week the safeguards on a Paradise packet had fried five remote units, one after the other. You didn’t take a chance on that happening to something important.

  A red light flashed on his screen, alerting him to a change in activity. Bingo. He leaned forward and studied the data that was now scrolling up for his perusal. And he grinned. Yeah, that was an Earth code all right, and a damned old one. No one but a collector would still have something like that on file ... shit, either someone was playing a very complicated joke, or the data was damned serious stuff. He could feel his pulse begin to race as he started to neutralize the security safeguards built into the packet. They weren’t focused on the whole package, he realized, but on one very small section, barely a few lines long.

  As he got near it, one of his alarms went off, and he quickly backed away and took a second look. The packet looked unchanged. He reran the last part of the search program to check for contamination ... and damn if something hadn’t gotten into his own equipment. Shit.

  He’d been through too much to get this far, didn’t want to go grabbing a clean disk and starting over. Besides, whatever had zapped his first set of programs might just do it to the next copy. That meant he had to weed out whatever he had picked up. He called up a comparison program to go through the software byte by byte, comparing key sections of code to a copy of the original. The console buzzed softly each time it zapped a piece of intruding code. He was too preoccupied to hear it.

  What the hell was this? Why was there a security program being triggered in the middle of the goddamned packet? It should have been there from the beginning, to protect the whole transmission. What sense did it make to protect this one small bit of code separately, as if it had come from some other source—

  He stared at the screen. His heart stopped beating for a second. He didn’t notice.

  A different source.

  Jesus Christ ...

  His decryption program had stopped. Layered encryption, it warned him. Proceed?

  His hands trembled slightly as he typed in, No. Isolate segment. Display.

  And he waited.

  The machine whirred softly, an unusual sound. He was driving it hard, that was certain. After a while a series of lines appeared on the screen. They were, of course, unreadable. He set the encryption program on them, and got another five lines. Still unreadable.

  His heart was pounding now. He felt as if he should look up and see if anyone else noted his uncharacteristic excitement, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. Trembling, he gave it instructions for a new decryption scan, and when the computer indicated that yes, it could crack this code as well, he felt something in his gut tighten up in anticipation.

  This was it, he thought. This had to be the one.

  At last the computer signaled its success. The five lines of alien text disappeared from the screen. Five other lines took their place.

  English.

  PROJECT JANET CONFIRMED UAO

  BELIEVE SUBJECT UNAWARE

  LAST ID JAMISIA SHIDO

  OUTPILOT ABILITIES UNEXPRESSED

  FIND AT ANY COST

  There was more, but that was supporting data. He didn’t look at it yet. He didn’t look at anything but those five lines.

  Outpilot abilities unexpressed.

  He managed to touch the control that would bring the screen down to darkness. This was no time t
o discover that someone was reading over his shoulder.

  Jesus Christ.

  At last he brought the contrast back up and typed,

  JAMISIA SHIDO. SEARCH.

  It did so. Four minutes. Four very long, very tense minutes. THREE, it said at last.

  The small number wasn’t surprising. Corporate names were tightly controlled, it was rare that people would share both given name and corporate. PLANET/STATION OF ORIGIN? he typed. Hands still shaking.

  The response this time was immediate.

  EARTH

  HELLSGATE

  ELISIA

  Earth. Reijik Station was one of the nodes that served Earth; if one wanted to intercept a woman fleeing from the motherworld’s sphere of influence, Reijik Station was one of the very few places one would have to warn.

  That had to be the one.

  Stivan had the computer give him all the information it had on that Jamisia Shido. There wasn’t much. Earth files were generally private things, not uploaded to the vast outernet system. But it seemed that with this woman there was even less than usual.

  Little wonder, he thought, if she was involved in some secret project. Little wonder if that project involved outpilots....

  He pressed forward, feeding icon after icon to the controlling programs. Cut the data packet open, pluck out the twice-encoded section. Close the data packet up again, working with code as fine as a surgeon’s scalpel to make it appear truly whole, as if nothing had ever been removed. Be careful, he told the stranger’s hands before him, be very careful, Delhi knows what she is doing. Leave nothing for her to find.