Queen of Nowhere

by Jaine Fenn

  When she finally read the resulting plaintext, she sat up so quickly that she banged her head on the cube’s low ceiling.

  Dolls definitely made here. Estimate: one-jifty to two hundred over the last thirty years. Artisan is solo but v. careful. Have located a possible loophole, which may require data skills. Details can follow: please advise protocol.

  About a third of the Enemy used names in the same format. The same format implied the same source. Her research had revealed Gracen to be the most likely source. This message confirmed it.

  ‘Dolls’ was Bez and Alpha83’s pre-agreed codeword for top quality false IDs. Someone on Gracen was procuring watertight identities that allowed the Enemy to impersonate humans. Bez could guess how: ‘reviving the dead’ was the ideal way to create a persona for long-term use; it was one she used on occasion - ‘Oloria Estrante’

  was a resurrectee - although given the time and effort required to seed such a persona, most of her identities were more transient.

  But the scale of the Gracen operation was breathtaking. If Bez could prove a mismatch between the original biometrics and those of the almost-human aliens now using the identities, she would have the evidence to unmask a third of the Sidhe in human-space.

  Despite her excitement at this potential breakthrough, Bez made herself get a full night’s sleep before responding to the message. The next morning she sent a manifoldly spoofed and deeply encrypted beevee message to Alpha8.3, requesting full details of her findings on a dataspike. The ‘spike would go to an interim address, which would initiate a blind pick-up by a secure shipping company, then another dead-drop via a human agent, then a second journey by courier, to eventually end up in a physical drop-box at Kotane.

  Kotane was two transits away in the direction of the Gracen system, and though it was not a hub she visited much, she had a watertight and well-funded local persona there. Bez’s peripatetic lifestyle came from a need to be in the right place at the right time to pick up and despatch the myriad messages and dataspikes required to run her network, while never staying in one place long enough for potential pursuers to catch up with her. Being dumped on Tarset had already blown her original schedule, and Kotane was a suitable next stop should the Gracen lead not pan out. It would be at least a week before Alpha83’s reply reached Kotane, so she could make a brief stopover at the intermediate hub-point to take advantage of the upcoming beevee trickle-down. Where possible, Bez preferred to leave a hub after any serious databreaking, and given there had already been trouble here she was loathe to ride the trickle-down whilst on Tarset.

  Priority messages like the one from Alpha83 would propagate across all her permanent datadrops throughout the hub network, but she needed to initiate rerouting protocols from her transient datadrops at Gerault, the hub she had originally been travelling to.

  First, she pinged BetaI6. Given ‘Frer Yolson’ was a fiction he maintained, the problem most likely originated with BetaI6 himself. A ping held no significant content and required only a simple coded acknowledgement; it was as secure as beevee messaging got.

  Although she accepted the need to rely on compromised communications and human agents, Bez sometimes fantasised about a universe with no such restrictions, where the sum total of information that defined and shaped - no that was - reality was freely accessible and fully comprehensible. After all, the universe itself was just data, albeit data that self-organised in unexpected ways.

  Before getting down to detailed rerouting and re-planning, she looked into onwards transport. By now the authorities would know that ‘Oloria Estrante’ had not left Tarset on the starliner, so they might still be taking an interest in lone female travellers.

  The Kenid Sari persona was limited on funds; Bez had a couple of more affluent secondaries here, but none of her Tarset personae held credit sufficient for starliner travel, so she would need to buy passage with a free trader. But there was one way of making an exit that would not require pre-booking, and would cost her nothing.

  It was time to call in a long-standing favour from one of her most valued Alpha agents, one of the few she thought of by name. In some ways, Captain Reen was the closest thing she had to an ally.

  Her ride was currently in a distant system and would take a while to arrive, and bee vee charges were already eating into Kenid Sari’s minimal resources, so after she had completed her virtual housekeeping Bez got herself a job. According to the local labour exchange, a chandlers’ shop in the mall needed restocking after a refurbishment. In this case, programming bots would have been more expensive than employing menial human labour. The four ten-hour shifts provided Bez with a bit of ready cash, and took her mind off the wait. It was also good cover, given interstellar criminals rarely stacked shelves. Not that Bez thought of herself as a criminal. Any laws she broke were a means to the end that ruled her existence: to take down the hidden alien menace that had destroyed her life and was secretly manipulating countless billions of other lives. Occasional victimless financial hacking was an acceptable price to pay.

  The job turned out to be physically demanding, and one of the permanent staff took a dislike to her on the logical if incorrect assumption that she was a hab-rat trying to make good. She did her best to keep up with the work and reacted as she always had to bullies, with cowed incomprehension.

  After two days she received an acknowledgement from Captain Reen that he was on his way. However, there was still no word from BetaI6. She had sent the original ping on a low priority channel in order to avoid attracting attention, so the problem could just be the limited capacity and scheduling issues inherent in the beevee network outside the hubs. Or he could have suffered a mishap.

  One of Bez’s greatest fears was that the Enemy would find one of her agents, read everything they knew from them, then take their place in her network. That was why every Alpha and Beta had their own unique codes, which changed regularly, and why no one who worked for her, with the exception of Captain Reen, had ever knowingly met her face-to-face. In some ways, BetaI6’s continued silence was encouraging, because if the Sidhe had subverted or replaced him, she would expect them to be actively using him against her. However, until she knew what had happened she had to cut all ties to BetaI6, which meant putting the Estrante persona, with its considerable resources, on ice.

  She was not sorry when the contract at the chandlers came to an end. She spent some of her earnings on a beevee connection to check a few of the forums she followed. The expensive and time-consuming beevee-board interactions she had originally pencilled in for Oloria Estrante’s visit to Gerault hub would have to wait.

  As there was still no word from BetaI6 she decided to ask for a datapacket summarising recent news from Sestine, his home system. The beevee charges would seriously deplete Kenid Sari’s remaining funds, but she had to know the reason for her recent near miss before she acted on the Gracen data. Only when she was sure the two events were unconnected would she truly believe that the break from Gracen was not too good to be true.

  STANDARD NEON-GRID ARCHITECTURE

  There are 571 Sidhe living among us, pretending to be human.

  Not much in a population of trillions spread over hundreds of systems, you say. You’re right: most of their dirty works is done by the human collaborators, agents and patsies they've dominated, blackmailed, bribed or simply fooled into on their behalf.

 

  Discovering that Captain Reen was running late, Bez tried to be patient. His revised ETA meant she would still be on Tarset for the trickle-down. This synchronisation sweep was a big one, the quarterly update that re-aligned massive volumes of non-essential information across human-space; and, notwithstanding the Gracen lead, she wanted to keep her options open. The trickle-down contained intel she needed, as well as being an ideal opportunity to move around some funds. She would just have to take what precautions she could and hack it from here.

  She started by changing both her hotel and her ID, deactivating the Sari identity
and taking on that of a freelance engineering specialist. Her new, somewhat smarter accommodation was within the means of this new persona.

  She had already checked all her physical drop-points; the dataspikes they contained were scheduled updates from Beta and Delta agents. She spent the remaining day on Tarset cutting a couple of new one-time code sets and starting the resulting dataspikes on their long and circuitous journeys.

  When the day of the trickle-down arrived, she found herself unexpectedly nervous. The timing would be close: the beevee update was due to begin at midnight, and Captain Reen should arrive eight hours later. She got some sleep in the afternoon then took a late meal in a dockside diner, after which she ambled round the mall.

  She slipped away from the carousers and late shoppers and up to a service door, which opened at her approach. Her current tags gave her access to areas off-limits to the sort of low-life she had recently been impersonating; specifically, to sections of the station currently under refurbishment, which on Tarset meant a lot of empty real estate.

  Once in the darkened service corridors, she called up an overlay to guide her to a gutted commercial unit that backed on to the main mall. She accessed the unit’s virtual stats to check the projected rebuild schedule and current asking rent. A later completion date and lower rent than the last time she’d looked; they must still be having problems with the ducts.

  She walked past the door, turned a corner then retraced her steps. Not that she had seen anyone besides a late-shift maintenance tech since leaving the mall. He had clocked her tags and smart coveralls, giving her a vague nod. But it did no harm to check for a tail. She also slipped into the local virtuality. Equally empty. Back in the real she positioned her spotcams, one beside the door and one on the wall opposite.

  She had already brought the relevant headware online so the lock was easily defeated. When the door opened she dialled up her visual acuity to offset the lack of light and saw, as she expected, a large bare room with partitioning and duct segments stacked against the side walls. Bez looked at the ceiling. She hardly needed to have fooled the lock: she could have just climbed in through one of the holes up there. The room was unpleasantly cold and permeated with a smell like over-ripe cheese. She stood in the doorway for a few moments, memorising obstacles, then stepped inside.

  The door closed behind her, leaving her in darkness. She navigated carefully across the room to the far wall and sat down. She had a few minutes yet. She calmed herself physically, performing breathing exercises to get her body into a low trance, putting aside the discomfort of the chill, smelly room and the darkness pressing on her eyes. Mentally she was as sharp and ready as she ever was, the prospect of the upcoming trip into the infoscape enough to focus her mind.

  Her chrono flashed: time to go. She leaned back against the wall and tuned in to the virtual.

  She floated above a plane of light. All around her a network of straight white lines defined countless cubes reaching off into infinity; different cubes glowed in subtly different colours and with different degrees of opacity. Overhead, the artificial structures were bright against the simulated darkness. The cube nearest her - that representing the Freetraders’ Alliance office, which her physical location backed on to - was a bright emerald green. As well as the visual simulation, she could hear faint buzzing in several different keys and frequencies. The more distracting sensual analogues that marked the flow of information - taste, touch, smell - she relegated to the back of her awareness.

  This was the standard neon-grid architecture, the default virtual schematic for a compact infoscape such as that of a large space habitat. Some station sysadmins tailored their virtualities, but most didn’t bother. People who spent a lot of time in virtualities tended to impose their own filters, converting their perceptions of the virtual landscape around them into an analogue of their home, or their favourite vacation spot, or a scene from a game or holo.

  Bez never bothered: what was the point of having to open lockers, conjure whirlwinds or impale monsters to get what you wanted?

  Her entry point was carefully chosen. She knew of several physical hideaways in the station that brought her out into the correct part of Tarset’s virtuality. She had considered entering near one of the station’s deep consolidation nodes, but getting access to the correct realworld space would have required a more serious hack. Besides, she planned to focus on free trader data this time, something she had missed out on during the last major trickle-down. If there was time, she would scope out the financial updates afterwards.

  She spent a while - a whole second in the real - not interfacing with anything, just watching.

  When she was sure her presence remained undetected, she turned her viewpoint upwards to the ‘sky’ of coloured boxes connected by glowing streams. The view was dimmer than it would be during the day: as though concepts like ‘day’ and ‘night’ mattered here. Even out in the real, night -like Universal Time itself - was a human construct, but thanks to the shifts pace beacons it was a consensual and constant illusion that held across all hub-points.

  Planets might be constrained by the vagaries of their physical environments, but hubs, Bez liked to think, ran on a grander and more objective schedule.

  She sensed the arrival of the trickle-down at the same moment she got visual confirmation. A resinous, tingling sweetness on the air, and suddenly the architecture brightened as though coming alive. White light flashed through the grid, the notification to local systems to make ready to accept incoming data. The glow faded, and a green-blue wave started to rush along selected data-lines.

  Seen from within a virtuality, the synchronising beevee update was not a trickle; it was more like a tsunami.

  Like water, its force diminished as it divided. By the time the flow reached the Alliance’s cube, it was no longer a wave but a roiling stream impossibly constrained inside an invisible tube.

  The volume of data was still impressive. The Freetraders’ Alliance administered interstellar trade, and even though travel between the stars was rare, people always wanted to purchase - or make a profit on - commodities they did not have.

  She propelled herself gently upwards to meet the datastream, at the same time raising her ‘arms’. She paused, waiting until the stream touched the cube behind her, then closed the distance. The virtual analogues of her hands uncurled into the stream.

  A jolt ran through her. The power of the interface might take a less experienced databreaker’s breath away and eject them back to the real. But she expected this, anticipated it even.

  What was actually happening, at speeds too fast for her consciousness to register even in this artificially accelerated frame of reference, was a complex interaction between the programmes in her head and the software that maintained this virtuality.

  She forced her hands further into the datastream. She was sinking into the base virtuality now, her visual awareness gone, the maelstrom of data feeding back as a jumble of smells, sounds, tastes and sensual pummellings across her palms and fingers. Ignoring the distractions, she opened her hands wide. Information started to flow into her, through her.

  She remained like that, conscious thought processes suspended, for some time. Even after her search-and-sift agents had completed their work and ghosted copies of the relevant information into her internal storage, part of her wanted to stay as she was, in this state of perfect grace.

  She had experienced the temptation, and resisted it, before.

  Besides, there was work to do. She withdrew her hands.

  As the visual simulation of the virtuality began to re-assert itself, she sensed that something was wrong. Not here: there was an intrusion from the real. Reluctantly, she pulled her consciousness back, patching her overlays into the feeds from her spotcams just in time to see a figure step up to the door leading into the room where her body was lying.

  CHANDIN

  (Cyalt Hub)

  Everyone has secrets.

  Commissioner Phal Chand in only had one s
ecret of any note, but it could ruin his life. Today, newly installed in an executive office on the penthouse level of Cyalt station, he was thinking about families, and The Mistake (as he referred to it when he thought about it at all) was lurking at the back of his mind.

  With his recent promotion came reward: a second child licence.

  Most people who attained his rank gifted the licence to their own offspring. But Commissioners were usually of an age when raising a family was no longer practical or desirable; Chandin, however, had worked hard to become the youngest Commissioner to serve the Pan-Human Treaty Commission for nearly a century. And Gerys was still willing to become a mother again - assuming, she said, that he wanted to be a father again. He was well aware how uneven the burden of rearing their son had been, thanks to having a father married primarily to his work. And his workload was only going to increase. If Milos had shown any interest in starting a family, he would have passed on the licence, but there was no point. Chandin had no problem either with his son’s sexuality or his avowed dislike of children, but he would have liked a grand-child, or even better, two. The alternative, to donate the licence to the lottery, was not one he felt comfortable with-

  A soft chime disturbed his reverie.

  He acknowledged the arrival of his visitor - precisely on time, as expected - and smiled when the door opened to admit Tanlia Crene, his oldest friend and most dangerous enemy. Tanlia advanced smoothly across the carpeted expanse of his office, her gaze sliding past him. ‘I have to see,’ she said breathlessly by way of a greeting.

  He knew that playful tone: always the games, with her. He stood up. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, gesturing to the picture window curving up and over the outermost quarter of his office.

  Tanlia strode right up to the edge, stopped, and said, ‘Well, that is something!’ as though coming across the view for the first time.