Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  He took her by the hand. “The more I think about it, the more I truly believe that this would be your best course of action. Get away from this madness that seems to be pursuing you. Allow yourself to relax with me at the retreat until your problems in the Colonies are brought to their own conclusion. Eventually, these killers are going to be stopped. Then you can come back as a free woman and make peace with your aunt. And, if at that time it is still of some importance to you, I am certain that this man from Clark Shuttle Service will still be available.”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know . . . it’s a high-end matchup, the kind of date that doesn’t happen without—”

  “Trust me, Susan.”

  She squeezed his palm, feeling his strength. She found herself smiling.

  “You’ve convinced me.”

  O}o{O

  “Keep your eye on the main screen,” urged Nick.

  The Lion hunched forward, watched the monitor dissolve to black as Nick typed in a CLEAR command. He hoped the midget was not going to take too much of his time. It was late Saturday afternoon and he was due to leave the Alexanders’ retreat shortly. He had to be at the other end of Irrya in an hour to address a special session of the United Clans concerning the just-announced detection of the returning starship.

  Nick typed rapidly. Some of his information printed across the bottom of the screen.

  FB-330-3367-T569. * IRS AUDIT 1991 *

  “The first set of numbers,” Nick explained, “is part of today’s E-Tech security code for that portion of the archives I’m trying to access. Courtesy of Adam Lu Sang. The second set—IRS Audit 1991—is my own custom program. It’s an infinite-repeat scanner, and a fairly powerful one. I coded it into the data vaults back around 2095, but even that was about a hundred years too late. I always wished that I’d had this program back in the days when the real IRS was trying to audit me.”

  “The real IRS?”

  “Never mind.”

  Nick typed: OPEN FILE GX-P34711-FY7-582HH-095D. Above his command, a green rectangle appeared on the dark screen. Within its borders, twin response lines printed.

  OPENING FILE GX-P34711-FY7-582HH-095D.

  CLOSING FILE GX-P34711-FY7-582HH-095D.

  “Cute, huh?”

  The Lion shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “The file I just ordered to open is pre-Apocalyptic, circa 2078. It contains technical specs and suggested design parameters for refraction tubing—the stuff that they weave into cosmishield glass to control what particular wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum can pass through. Now this file, in terms of size, contains about eight hundred megabytes—a pretty fair amount of data. It’s also nicely protected—nothing as sophisticated as a soft perimeter, but still with enough standard safeguards to discourage illegal entry.

  “I discovered this program about two hours ago, during a random search. I notified Adam. He’s down in the data vaults right now. He worked up the physiograph—located the file’s actual position within the network. Like most of the old files, it’s a cascading floater, with geriatric sequence patterns. Finding its exact location, at any one moment, was no simple task, not when you take into consideration the fact that the program has duplicates and backups scattered in a dozen other subsystems throughout the Colonies. We’re talking multidimensional vectors. But Adam’s a smart boy; he figured it out. He knows his network.”

  “I’m sure he does,” muttered the Lion.

  Nick grinned. “Sorry, I forgot. You’re not real heavy into computers.”

  “A sound conclusion.”

  “Okay—in simple terms. What we have here is a program that is being opened and closed at the same time, a contradictory situation. That particular type of illogic constituted the basic target parameter for my initial search. I went looking for just such an anomaly. I created a set of tangent cruisers and gave them multistage access to the E-Tech archives. They turned up this program.

  “I believe that our sunsetter is inside this file right now, doing its dirty work. That’s why we’re getting the contradictory message. I’m ordering the program to open, and a fraction of a second later, the sunsetter is ordering it to close, so that the sunsetter can carry on with its data erasure. But as soon as the sunsetter closes the program, my little IRS orders it to open again. And so it goes, ad infinitum. The net effect is that file GX-P34711-FY7-582HH-095D has been caught in a logic loop. It’s going to keep on opening and closing itself until one of two things occur: Either I call off the IRS, which I’m not going to do, or the sunsetter decides it’s had enough of this opening-closing bullshit and decides to do something about it.”

  “What will it do?”

  A faint grin spread across Nick’s face. “I really don’t know. But whatever action it takes should tell us something about our enemy. Give us a bit of a psychological profile, so to speak.”

  “You make this sunsetter sound almost . . . humanly conscious.”

  “Really powerful programs mimic the thought patterns and even the emotional temperaments of their creators. Assuming our sun-setter’s presence in the archives is no accident, then we have to conclude that there’s a guiding hand behind its actions. It has a mommy.”

  The Lion frowned. “Would this ‘mommy’ be controlling the sunsetter right now?”

  “Probably not. Most likely, the program’s mommy arranged for regular rendezvous. On a scheduled basis, perhaps once every few weeks, the sunsetter will deliver a status report to a specific terminal, somewhere in the Colonies. At that time, the sunsetter would also be able to receive new or updated orders from its mommy.”

  “Could you trace the sunsetter to one of these rendezvous points?”

  Nick shook his head. “Not to the regularly scheduled rendezvous, not unless its mommy was extraordinarily careless, which under the circumstances seems unlikely. But we may be able to create a situation where the sunsetter is forced to run to mommy for added input. Or mommy might have to make an unscheduled contact, give the sunsetter some new orders. In those scenarios, if we’re lucky, we might be able to trace the program to its rendezvous point.”

  “And then?”

  “And then maybe we catch a bad guy. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I doubt if our sunsetter’s going to run home to mommy just because my IRS is giving it a hard time. Right now, I’d settle for—” The screen turned blue and white; the rectangle housing the opening and closing commands disappeared into a streaky white haze. The Lion was instantly reminded of one of those rare Earth skies, video documented by E-Tech ground crews, where the atmospheric pollutants were temporarily swept aside to reveal cottony fluffs against an endless blue backdrop.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” muttered Nick. “Freebird.”

  “What?”

  “Freebird, a rescue program, the prototype of which was designed by the Koreans. Pre-Apocalyptic, late twenty-first century—from the same era that gave rise to sunsetters. A very, very powerful program.”

  The pastoral scene began to change; the clouds started to disintegrate as if violent winds were ripping them apart. The Lion stared intently, not understanding, but fascinated by the ephemeral display. In another few seconds, the clouds were gone. Only a blue screen remained.

  Nick typed: open file GX-P34711-FY7-582HH-095D. In response, the screen faded to black.

  A deep frown rippled the midget’s forehead. He gazed silently at the blank monitor.

  “Not what you were expecting?” quizzed the Lion.

  “About the last thing in the world I was expecting.” Nick looked agitated. “A rescue program. Now where in the hell did that come from? And not just any old rescue program, but Freebird. Jesus Christ!”

  “How do you know it was . . . Freebird?”

  “’Cause I’ve seen this program work before. I recognized its signature—the clouds, the blue skies, the patterns on the screen. Freebird is a defender. In the event of an attack against one of the programs it’s assigned to protect, Freebird a
lters that program’s physiograph—changes its location within the computer. That’s what occurred here. Freebird moved file GX-P34711-FY7-582HH-095D to a new location, probably to remove it from the logic loop that my IRS was creating.”

  “Can you find this file again?”

  “Sure. Adam can work up another physiograph. It’ll probably take about an hour. But by that time, our sunsetter might be done reaming out the file’s data and have vacated the premises. And if not—if the sunsetter’s still inside the program, and I go after it again with my IRS—then Freebird will probably reappear and snatch the file away again.”

  “Ad infinitum,” said the Lion.

  “You’re beginning to catch on.”

  “Is there anything you can do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to have to give the problem some serious thought. What worries me the most is that it appears that our sunsetter and Freebird are working together. I never heard of such a collaboration. I mean, rescue programs were originally designed to thwart sunsetters and other data destroyers. If the sunsetter’s the bad guy, then the rescue program is supposed to be the good guy. In this case, they appear to be working for the same side.”

  “That’s not very fair,” quipped the Lion.

  Nick grinned fiercely. “I’ll say. It’s sort of like King Kong being protected by a guardian angel.”

  The Lion had heard of guardian angels.

  Blue letters appeared across the top of the dark screen. WHAT HAPPENED? I HAVE LOW-LEVEL DISTORTIONS AND A COMPLETELY ALTERED PHYSIOGRAPH. PLEASE EXPLAIN.”

  “That’s Adam,” said Nick, recovering his composure. The midget typed: EVER HEAR OF FREEBIRD?

  There was a pause. Then: YOU’RE KIDDING.

  I WISH I WAS.

  WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?

  Nick smiled grimly. I GUESS WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO LEARN TO FLY.

  O}o{O

  Gillian thought the near-empty Irryan restaurant bordered on garish, with its array of helium-filled imitation animals floating against the ceiling: panda bears, German Shepherds, mini llamas, a host of gray squirrels with massive tails and bucked teeth. At first glance, the monochrome walls—in stark contrast to the aerial menagerie—appeared almost elegant, with their tiny black-on-white stripes blending together into a linear fog of pearly ash. Only when he returned from the lavatory and sat down in their corner booth did the walls take on a more oppressive quality. At close range, the soft graying effect was lost; the black and white stripes leaped out at him, exposing themselves as a wild conglomeration of twentieth-century supermarket bar codes, each one meticulously checker-boarded into prominence. He would probably have developed a headache if he had not had one already.

  “Feeling any better?” asked Buff. She sat across from him in the booth, her bare black elbows propped on the white tablecloth, her chin resting in upturned palms. Eyes followed his every motion.

  “Just getting away from that auditorium helped,” he lied. “Where’s Martha?”

  “Outside. Making sure that Xornakoff didn’t have us followed.”

  “I doubt whether our inspector was that suspicious.”

  Buff frowned. “I don’t know. You were acting pretty weird back there. What happened to you?”

  “I told you. I ate too much for breakfast. Necropsy work is better performed—”

  “You didn’t look sick,” she interrupted.

  “I was.”

  Buff shrugged. “Look, if you don’t want to tell me what all that weirdness was about, then don’t. But please, Amphos, don’t spoon me shaft oil and tell me it’s grape juice. They don’t taste the same.”

  “I know what you mean. I’ve had a funny taste in my mouth since we met.”

  She straightened and regarded him coolly. “What do you mean?”

  He mimicked: “We’re sort of . . . security consultants . . . freelance . . . sort of.”

  A hearty chuckle filled the restaurant. “Yeah, I guess we weren’t as straight with you as we could have been. But it’s basically true. We are in the security business.”

  Martha ambled in from the doorway, her long blond ponytails flopping from side to side. Again, Gillian was reminded of one of those ancient air club dancers. The taller woman shared more than jeweled nipples with wing nuts; there was a certain casual grace—if that was the phrase for it—in the way that Martha carried herself. Yet it was more than that, more than mere self-confidence and feminine allure, although she possessed those attributes in abundance. Martha was one of those women who, if she were stark naked, could appear to be fully dressed, wearing her flesh as if it were an exoskeleton, a removable framework. But she wore it well, like seasoned firewood wore the flame.

  She eased into the seat beside Buff. The black woman regarded her with a questioning gaze.

  “We weren’t followed,” Martha answered.

  Gillian studied them both now, side by side, this oddly different pair, Buff warm and friendly, Martha cool and distant, and he knew that the women belonged together, and had probably been together for a very long time. Less than lovers, but more than partners.

  A male waiter, who could not have been older than fourteen, emerged from the back of the restaurant. He rested his thighs against their table and leaned forward. “Sorry,” he said, crooking a finger at their menu keyboard mounted on the wall side of the booth. “Your terminal’s busted. You’ll have to tell me what you want.”

  “No,” said Martha calmly. “That won’t do.”

  The boy looked at her for a moment, then frowned. “The menu terminal’s busted,” he repeated.

  “Can you fix it?”

  “I . . . don’t think so.” He grinned at her, but she did not return the smile. He swallowed nervously. “I . . . uh . . . have to take your orders manually.” He held up his tiny keypad. “With this.”

  “What if that’s not acceptable?” probed Martha.

  “Uh . . . you can move to another booth—”

  “We’re comfortable here.”

  “Then . . . I don’t know what else I can do.” The young waiter shrugged his shoulders in exaggerated fashion, accenting his confusion. “I have to take your orders—”

  “Manually,” finished Martha. “Yes, we know. You’ve already told us that. How long have you worked here?”

  “Uh . . . about a month.”

  “Any customer ever give you a hard time before?”

  He shook his head vehemently. “No. Never.”

  “So I’m the first?”

  The boy didn’t know what to say. He just stood there, leaning against the table, his attention pinned to Martha.

  “Bet you weren’t expecting someone like me when you got out of bed this morning?” she quizzed.

  “Uh . . . would you like to talk to the manager?”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  Again, he swallowed nervously. “Look, ma’am, I don’t know what you want—”

  “I want coffee,” said Martha sweetly. “And put in a dash of vanilla.”

  The boy programmed her order, then turned quickly to Buff.

  “Nothing here.”

  Gillian asked for seltzer water.

  The boy practically ran back to the kitchen.

  Buff grinned and slapped her partner’s arm. “Really, Martha, he’s just a child. You try taking him to bed and his mommy will probably come after you with a hot blade.”

  “She’ll never know.”

  Buff sighed. “He’ll probably tell her.”

  “I like him. He’s got a cute downside.”

  “You’re Costeaus,” announced Gillian, surprised that he had not realized it sooner.

  Buff raised her eyebrows, countering him. But Gillian knew he was right. As if in acknowledgment to his deduction, the headache—a final reminder of his recent hyperalert state—vanished. He was himself again, fully engaged in the present, unfettered by remnants from the past. For now, Catharine and Empedocles had returned to the shadows.

  “What clan?” he press
ed. “The Alexanders?”

  Buff stared at him silently. Martha looked away.

  “Look, you want me to be straight with you, I will. But you have to return the favor. Now, what clan are you from?”

  Buff glanced at Martha, then nodded. “We’re originally from the Cerniglias. But now we serve the Lion.”

  “And what do you do for Jerem Marth?”

  “We work on special assignments.”

  “And what was your assignment regarding me?”

  “We’re supposed to assist you—”

  “And keep an eye on me, too, no doubt.” Gillian shook his head slowly. Suddenly, it was all so obvious. “You have orders from Nick, as well as from the Lion?”

  No response.

  “Did they tell you who I really am?”

  Buff hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then she shrugged. “You’re Gillian. You hunt and kill Paratwa.”

  The boy returned with their coffee and water, setting the table quickly, avoiding eye contact with Martha. As he turned to go, Martha reached out and pinched his right buttock. The boy jerked his hips forward, then broke into another fast jog toward the safety of the kitchen. Martha smiled.

  Buff chuckled. “I’ll bet you he has a stiff cock.”

  “Maybe,” said Gillian. “But I’ll bet you he doesn’t do anything about it.”

  Martha sipped her coffee and said nothing.

  Buff hunched forward. “Look, Amphos, or Gillian, or whatever the hell name you want us to call you—”

  “In private, Gillian will suffice.”

  “Look, Gillian, we’re just supposed to help you. Naturally, we’re to keep an eye on you. But only to keep you out of any trouble.”

  “You’re lying,” said Gillian.

  Buff scowled. “You’re not a very trusting person.”