He did not look happy at the prospect, but neither did he look like he’d back down. So I nodded. Starting a fight with the gate guard was not going to help me sneak into Zeus’s office.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a loaner tunic?”
The cyclops visibly relaxed. “That we do. Tons of ’em.” He gestured for me to follow him into the temple and nodded at a curtained-off alcove in one corner. “In the changing area, every size you could want. Even got one for blue boy there.” He jabbed a finger at Melchior, who had been keeping a very low profile.
“Not really,” said the webgoblin.
The cyclops just nodded.
A few minutes later we stepped out, ready to face the world. Well, not really. In Fate’s family everyone is expected to wear the garb of a sixteenth-century courtier at formal functions. I’d always felt a little self-conscious in tights, but I’d grown up with them. Turns out I hadn’t really understood what self-conscious meant. Now I did.
The tunics were one size fits all. Not in the classic there-was-one-size-and-everyone-wore-it-as-best-they-could way. No, this used magic. You put it on and it adjusted itself to your size. And whoever had decided what constituted “your size” had a very different idea about hemlines than I did. It covered the appropriate bits, but only just. Bending over, a stiff breeze, or, well, a stiff something else, would all endanger my modesty in a serious way. Also, the thing was more than a little on the sheer side. Again, I was technically covered, but only just. I found myself with a powerful desire to keep my bag firmly in front of me, or I would have if I’d been allowed to keep it. Instead, I had a borrowed leather wallet that slung over a shoulder but didn’t hang low enough to be of any use.
“Damn rent-a-clops,” said Melchior, tugging at his own hem as we exited the back door of the temple into Olympus proper. “This thing makes me feel naked.”
“Mel, you don’t wear clothes.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. Being naked and feeling that way are not the same thing at all. One’s natural, the other is exposed. The sandals suck, too.”
I had to agree with him. The pair of loosely foot-shaped pieces of leather held on by a bondage fetishist’s dream of a strapping system might provide some protection for the sole of the foot, but they were shit for traction. This was a problem, since the same idiot responsible for the rest of the décor had decreed the streets be made of gleaming slabs of polished white marble. Pretty? Yes. Practical? Not so much. I missed my boots and leathers, especially with the winter cold.
The shoes meant that most of my attention during our hike up to the top of the mountain and the biggest temple of them all stayed on my feet and not on the scenery. But hey, there’s only so much you can say about an architectural monoculture done up in stark white stone. It gets old fast, and I was glad when we finished our trip.
Another rent-a-clops stood on duty just outside the main door, this time wearing the requisite loincloth and carrying a club, and looking damned cold. He did, however, have a little white earpiece with a wire leading back over his shoulder and down to a suspicious-looking bulge under the back flap of his loincloth. When he gave me a fish eye but waved me inside anyway, I figured that the news from the front gate must have whispered itself in his ear. That put me inside the building, but only as far as the audience hall. I figured I’d have to work a lot harder for Zeus’s actual office, even if he never did go in there except for affairs of state.
The interior architecture was almost, though not quite, as monotonous as the exterior. There was lots more white marble, enough to make the place look like the world’s biggest and most expensive executive restroom. Even the cubicles, installed to house Zeus’s ever-growing support staff and tucked in neat rows behind the support pillars, were white marble. I gave them a wide berth as I made my way through the front room and toward the back and the stairs. Zeus’s office is a little miniature temple in the round, sitting like a cupola on the roof of the main temple. Through some magic of Zeus’s, it’s invisible from street level. An esthetic blessing, that—otherwise, it would look like some sort of growth.
When I’d been here last, I’d had time to marvel at the views, since it’s quite literally situated at the top of the world. I’d also wondered briefly about the fact that it was completely open to the elements and yet none of the papers on the desk ever went blowing around and it was a perfect balmy seventy-four degrees. But hey, what’s the fun of being a weather god if you can’t dick with local conditions in your favor?
I was still trying to figure out how I’d talk my way past the secretary and any other security when I stepped through the arch into the outer office. A big square room with no windows, it held a desk—white marble, what else—several really uncomfortable-looking chairs—same again—a stock of out-of-date copies of Modern Mythos Magazine—motto “All the Godsip fit to print”—and not much else besides the locked door leading to the spiral stairs and the big guy’s office.
Now, Zeus tends to hire the dim and curvy for receptionist duty—available in large quantities from the ranks of Olympus’s nymphs—but having one abandon her post just when I needed a break seemed a little too good to be true. It was at this point that I decided that either Tyche—Dame Fortune herself—was smiling on me from her own office, just down the hill a bit—or I was being set up again. Being of a suspicious nature, I figured it was probably the latter, but I really needed to have another crack at Necessity’s network, so I decided to pretend I believed I could have luck that good.
Taking one last look around to make sure I really was all alone, I slipped over to the desk and reached underneath to hit the door release. With a gentle click, the lock opened, and I was on my way upstairs. I’d gotten around one and a half loops of the stair when a third possibility suggested itself to me rather forcefully. Not only was the secretary not missing, but the big guy himself was in as well, and dictation wasn’t on the menu.
There’s something about rhythmic thumping and moans of “Oh Zeusy, give it to me,” that really doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. That was a serious problem. While I might be able to talk a subordinate around to the idea that I was just a repair guy on a call, the ostensible caller was not going to buy it.
“Now what?” whispered Melchior.
“Why don’t you slip up there and see if there’s any chance they’ll be done soon, or if we might be able to use the computer while they’re distracted?”
“Why don’t you do it?”
I raised an eyebrow and held my hands up in a comparison of our relative sizes and stealthiness. Since Melchior isn’t much bigger than a cat, and he’s a whole lot smarter, he had to agree. With a disgruntled snort, he slid out of sight upward. After a very brief interval, he returned, shaking his head.
“Not a chance. The chaise is pulled up right in front of the computer, and they appear to be playing monkey-see monkey-do with streaming video from some site devoted to the better understanding of human fluid exchange. So, what’s Plan B?”
I shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to find another computer. Once we get out of here, we’d better check in with Cerice and see how things are going on her end.”
Melchior nodded, and as soon as we’d found a quiet alleyway, he opened a VOMP line. I wasn’t thrilled about making even that much connection to the local wireless, not with Athena running the network security for Olympus. But VOMP is low bandwidth, and I’d be just one caller among many. Everyone on Olympus uses the system these days. It’s become the standard for the whole great sprawl of our contemporary pantheon. That’s why I’d set Kira up with a VOMP phone. Of course, I’d only remain below the radar as long as I kept my usage at a reasonable level. If I tried to open the multiple channels I’d need to send myself into the system on a hacking jaunt, I’d light up Athena’s bandwidth monitors like Apollo’s chariot rolling into a dark room.
When Cerice picked up the line, I gave her a quick rundown of what had happened and asked how she was doing.
“We’re screwed,” she answered, calmly and very finally.
“Would you care to elaborate on that?” I asked.
“I got bored with waiting for you and jacked in for a quick look-see myself.”
No surprise there. Cerice is every bit as much of a hacker and cracker as I am, and just as likely to succumb to the temptation to explore a bit. “And?”
“You remember that black box we found when we went looking for Shara?”
“The one that sent her off to souladmin@necessity . . . ? Of course I remember it. Who could forget a dot-dot-dot mweb address? What about it?”
“It’s gone.”
“Gone? It can’t be gone. It was part of the hardware architecture.”
“It’s gone, and there aren’t any others either. Shara told me where to find the one that you and Eris cracked. It’s gone, too. There are no links from the mweb’s core architecture to Necessity’s system anymore. We’re locked out.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Locked out,” I repeated. Not a witty response, I admit, but I was not feeling up to witty. “Is there anything at all where the black box used to sit?”
“Yes. Three tiny pips, like pomegranate seeds, only in Shara purple.”
“Did you try to do anything with them?” I asked.
“No,” said Cerice, and I could practically hear her rolling her eyes, “I just stared at them blankly. Of course I took a crack at them. As near as I can tell they’re some sort of biometric identification system.”
“Like an iris scanner?”
“More like a virtual DNA chip, if I had to make a guess, but I really can’t tell. It wouldn’t respond to anything I tried, and unless you happen to have a few strands of Persephone’s hair or some nail parings that you can somehow link to your anima and carry into the mweb, I don’t think you’ll be able to do much more.”
I nodded. I’m better at finding flaws in a system than Cerice is, but she was probably right on this. Magical signatures are virtually impossible to forge. That’s one place where the mweb and its more mundane human analogues differ wildly. When I’m jacked in, I’m not just some kind of electronic avatar. My soul is literally within the machine, and my magical DNA becomes a part of every significant work of magic I do either there or in the real world. It was likely that only a jacked-in Persephone herself could open the lock in question.
“Ravirn?” asked Cerice. “Are you still there? What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re going to have to talk to Persephone.”
Melchior cleared his throat. “You do remember that she’s in Hades at the moment? If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not go back for another visit.”
“I’m with you there, Melchior. But I’m not willing to just stand by and let Shara be ruined or the mweb destroyed.” I laughed a rueful little laugh. “Especially since I’m likely to take the blame for the latter. Somehow I don’t think that telling Necessity it was all an accident, and I didn’t intend to release a doomsday virus into her network is going to cut it as a defense.”
“Really?” said Melchior. “You don’t say.” Then he sighed. “So, does that mean you have a plan?”
“Of course not, though I do have one or two ideas. Why don’t we all get back together and find someplace where we can think things through without worrying so much about the local security forces?”
“Sounds good,” said Cerice, “I know just the place. Meet me back where we came in.”
“Done,” I said, signaling Melchior to hang up.
Getting back to the front gate and out of our shepherd boy clothes didn’t take much effort. Neither did the hike back to our entry point. We were just about there when Melchior binged.
“Incoming . . .” He paused. “Now, that’s just plain weird.”
“What?” I asked.
He held up a hand. “Hang on, I’m still figuring it out. It’s like a Vtp link, but not quite. Wait, I think I’ve got i—” Foggy multicolored light poured from his eyes and mouth, forming a rough sphere. It looked something like a smoke bomb going off at an expensive rave, one of the ones with a light show optimized for a chemically enhanced audience.
A bright fiery point appeared at the center of the globe, expanding to show a view of Tisiphone’s face surrounded by the ever-changing colors of the Primal Chaos. Melchior was right, it looked something like a visual transfer protocol link, but not quite. If the background was anything to go by, I didn’t think there were any computers involved.
“How are you doing that?” I asked, absolutely fascinated by the mechanics of the thing.
Tisiphone grimaced. “That’s not important right now.”
“But—” I began.
“Later, if you have a later, and you’re still interested, I’ll explain it. In the meantime, I don’t have very long to talk, and there are things you need to know.”
“Every time somebody says something like that to me, they follow it up with bad news. I don’t suppose you’re planning on breaking the pattern?”
She snorted. “Mother’s gone off-line.”
“Do you mean Necessity can’t be reached? Or that the mweb’s gone completely?”
“The former. We can’t reach her, and all the portals leading into her domain have been sealed.”
I thought about that for second, and about what I’d recently learned about the way the whole system ran. “Doesn’t that have the effect of taking out the mweb, too?”
“No. The mweb servers at the Temple of Fate are completely capable of running the show for quite a while without input from Necessity. She normally only interferes when something goes seriously wrong or when it’s time for an upgrade.”
“So, maybe this is a good thing. If there’s no contact between Shara’s doppelganger and the mweb servers, things should at least stop getting worse.”
“I wish that were the case,” said Tisiphone, her voice mournful. “It might make me feel a little better about getting cut off from Mother. But the seals are only closed one way. Mweb management orders are still coming out. We can’t read them now—they’ve been encrypted—but the servers are continuing to erase node information.”
“Shit.”
“There’s more, and worse, at least from your point of view.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Alecto and Megaera and I have tried everything we can think of to get through to Mother, but nothing works. We can’t even get there in person, and until now, none of us thought there was anywhere we couldn’t go.”
I hadn’t thought so either, and I suspected it wasn’t going over at all well. “How are they taking it?”
“They’re furious, if you’ll pardon the expression. And they’re looking for someone to punish.”
I was pretty sure I could see where this was going. “Let me guess the next part. That someone is me.”
“Uh-huh. We lost contact with Mother while we were talking to Discord about you and Shara.”
“I don’t suppose she did anything to help my case.”
“She was too busy being impressed by your ability to remove Necessity from the equation.”
“Remind me to do her a favor in return sometime.” I rubbed my forehead. It didn’t do anything for the headache I’d suddenly acquired. “So, are you and your sisters on your way to kill me now?”
“No, we have a stop to make first.”
“Where?”
“I was outvoted, two to one.”
“Are you going to tell me about it? Or do I have to guess?”
“We’re not comfortable with autonomy,” said Tisiphone. “We’re used to working with orders.”
I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “And?”
“And we’re temporarily placing ourselves under the authority of the Fates. Just for the duration of the emergency. We’re taking them the evidence against you now.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to think about it. At just tha
t moment a great crashing arose in the forest upslope, accompanied by a deep, hooting sound. The call of a hunting owl, symbol of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and chief of Olympian security.
Only then did it occur to me to wonder how much bandwidth Tisiphone’s novel form of communication required, and whether it would trigger Athena’s security.
“Shit. Gotta go, Tisiphone. Bye.”
I scooped Melchior up and took off down the hill. For a few seconds longer the strange foggy light kept spilling from his eyes and mouth, then I heard a whispered “Good-bye,” and it tapered off.
“That was the weirdest thing,” Melchior said after a moment. “She was doing something really strange to the actual mweb carrier wave, like she was messing around with the energy source to create some kind of virtual transmission system, sending binary by pulsing the power flow.”
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