Inside the cracked shell she finds the flaw, and behind it teases out the tangled bits that were her favorite monitor, and something else. She lays the pieces out module by module and line by line, bright against a slab of black she conjures out of nothing, and separates her own program from the stranger. She recognizes the hand at once, and swears softly, checks the routines again. It’s a familiar program, anyway, though there’s no guarantee that the one who wrote it was the one who launched it against the company—but she feels the knowledge cold against her, the fragments of data pricking her fingers like shards of glass.
Overhead, a syscop calls from where the system IC(E) was dented. It’s a bruise along the edge of one bright bar of the codewall, but it’s all the trail she’ll ever find. She leaves the scraps of program to the nearest watchdog, and lets herself out the way the stranger came in—the stranger who may not be a stranger, not at all. She puts that thought aside, and launches herself out into the greater net.
Power lies before her, planes and fields and streams of light, the familiar night-city that lies always in her core. She smiles her pleasure even as she shapes a tool to filter the information, searching for a method that was once as familiar to her as her own best tools, a hand on the keyboards as clever as her own. The program darts away, a shape vaguely like a bird, spiraling out across the glittering fields, finds a trace and stoops to it, transmitting codes. Numbers flash in front of her eyes—Match inexact, probability of match 70.09%, follow yes/no—but she barely sees them. The brainworm translates the same input into a touch, a scent and a feeling, like and yet not the same as the hand she thought she’d followed. Frowning now, she signals follow and lets the program run, drifting armored along the lines of light, through datastreams like rivers of white fire. She passes a familiar node, and then another, bathed in sudden flares as systems challenge and then accept her presence. She knows even before the stream slows and swells and tangles in and around itself that she will lose this trail in the spreading swamp of the BBS, the market delta where all the data in the world eventually collects, puddles, and, muddied, goes free.
The trail ends, her program vanishes with a spark like an exclamation point. She slows herself, surveying the vast and marshy space, where lines and lights merge and cross and twine like parasites around each other’s roots. There are few shadows here, at least to the sight, but the steady glow, the slow pulse and steady buzz of unprotected data, hides more than it reveals. She gives herself a moment longer, savoring the salt tang of the free data, then finds a familiar line and follows it, moving through the crowding symbols and the overloaded petty-nodes with the ease of long familiarity. A major node flashes green and welcoming at last, terminus and gateway for a thousand low-budget users. She touches it, whispers code, and lets it snatch her home.
Coigne called the meeting for breakfast the next morning, leaving her six hours to prepare. She didn’t really need the time, had done all that could be done in the first few minutes after the codewall had been breached, but she complained about it anyway, knowing Coigne would respect her more for objecting to his plans. She spent another hour or so reviewing the data her hard-working staff had culled from the records—there were no surprises there, nothing she hadn’t already figured out in the seconds it had taken her to analyze the wreckage of the program and to trace the stranger’s trail—and went to bed.
She was up before the alarm, showered and dressed to the familiar murmur of the in-house news service spilling from the muted screen. There was no word of the intrusion, even on the high-level channels that she was cleared for, and she didn’t quite know if she was glad of it, or worried. She listened with half an ear to the latest profit projections broken down by division—an exercise in controlled intimidation that she usually followed religiously, because the number-two and last-place divisions would be ripe for on-line mischief—and wondered what she was going to say to Coigne. As little as possible, she thought, as always, and reached into her closet for the rest of her suit. Most of her look was already in place, her nails painted the hard dull-surfaced fuchsia that looked like the icing on a cookie, a flat, cheap color that worried the suits who saw her because they didn’t know how she’d dare. She had painted her lips and cheeks and eyes the same hard color, shocking against the careful pallor of her skin, and the black of the chosen suit only intensified the effect. It was subtly wrong for her job, like the rest of her look—like all of her, wrong sex, wrong class, wrong attitude most of all: the skirt a little too short, the jacket too mannish, with none of the affectations or compromises of corporate femininity. The heels of her shoes were painted the same stark fuchsia as her nails.
She looked hard at herself in the mirror, straightening the narrow skirt a final time. It would do—she would do; the look would remind them none too subtly that she could dress the way she did, could walk into their boardroom on her terms because they needed her. She could afford to dress this way—she was the only one who could afford to dress this way—because she was who and what she was. She was the only one, of all of them, who had to.
She put that thought aside—not something she could afford to acknowledge, not with Coigne waiting—and turned to the banked consoles to collect the pocketbook system with its downloaded data. Everything she needed was there, from the sanitized version of her report—Coigne would get the real one—to the software that would let her display and manipulate those figures for the board, to the homebrew stripped-down interfaces that let her achieve limited access to the nets even from the low-powered pocketbook. It wasn’t enough to feed the brainworm, gave her only a standard view, but it was enough to work with. She touched an icon to check the directory one final time, then hit the sleeper key and folded the screen away. She took extra care to double-lock the flat’s door behind her when she left.
A car was waiting in the driveway, just outside the courtyard gates. Coigne’s car, she realized in the split second before the nearest window slid down to reveal the hard-boned face.
“Good morning, Cerise. I thought you might need a ride.”
“You still don’t trust me, Coigne.” She smiled to hide the cold knot in the pit of her stomach. It had not been in her mind to run, but the fact that Coigne had thought she might made her wonder if she should have done so. “I’m disappointed.”
“So am I.” Coigne’s face disappeared, and the door snapped open.
Cerise slid into the car’s dim interior, into the faint smell of leather and the sunlight cut by the smoky bulletproof windows. Coigne was outlined against the far window, a thin, fair man with white-blond hair cut close to the stark planes of his skull. His wide mouth twisted into a brief, humorless smile, and he leaned forward to touch a button on the control panel mounted just below the divider that separated the passengers from the driver’s pod. The door closed itself, and the car slid smoothly into gear, picking up speed as it passed through the courtyard gate and out onto the expressway feeder. It was all corporate land here, manicured to expensive perfection in front of the identical blocks of flats and houses bought from the same prefab supplier, allowed to go to an approximation of wilderness in the ditch that separated the access road from the feeder and the overarching flyway.
“So what happened?” Coigne asked.
Cerise reached into her carryall, handed him the disk she had prepared. “That’s my report.”
Coigne took it, slid it into the datadrive set into the armrest beside him. He slipped a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and plugged the fine cable into the drive before fitting the temple pieces over his ears. The dark backing on the display lenses made him look blind. “But what happened?” he said again.
“Pretty much what you see,” Cerise said, and then, because she knew he expected more, “Someone—a pretty skilled someone—pried a gap in main IC(E) and penetrated the Corvo division subgroup. Response time was excellent, and as far as I can tell nothing was damaged or stolen.”
“Copies?”
“Impossible to tell
.” She gave the bad news without flinching, refusing to apologize or justify.
“Find out.”
“The only way I can do that,” Cerise said, “is to wait and see if anything shows up on the market. I’ve already got feelers out, but it’s too soon to tell.”
“I see.” Coigne unplugged the dataline, then lifted the glasses off and slipped them back into their pocket. “I’ve heard a name in all of this.”
“Have you?” Cerise made herself relax against the heavy padding, felt the draft from the comfort systems cool on her legs. The car topped the rise onto the flyway, slipped sideways through a gap in the traffic, and settled into the passing lane. Cars flashed past to her right, overtaken in the slow lane, their shapes blurred by the smoky glass. The regular compound-to-compound commuter shuttle rumbled past, trundling along its track in the center of the flyway. For an instant, the low sun caught and flamed in its mirrored windows, and then it was gone.
“The word is,” Coigne said, “that Trouble’s back on-line.”
Cerise sat very still, knowing better than to speak the lie that had sprung instantly to her tongue. Trouble’s dead—but Trouble wasn’t dead, and it would be too easy to find out that truth, and then it would be too late to convince Coigne that she could still be trusted.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about it,” Coigne said.
Cerise shook her head, managed a faint, one-shouldered shrug. “It would be the first sign I’d seen of Trouble since I came to work for you.” She paused, and tried the lie. “At one point, I heard she was dead.”
Coigne ignored it. “You and Trouble used to work together. I would’ve thought you’d recognize the style.”
“Anyone can copy style,” Cerise said, and laced her tone with faint contempt. “Hell, I see my own programs on the nets, copies of my own work trying to break my IC(E). Style isn’t an ID, Coigne.”
“Not legally, but I would have thought it would be enough for you. Especially since it was enough to set other people talking.” Coigne looked sideways at her, met her eyes for the first time. “I’m sure I can rely on you, Cerise.”
He didn’t need to articulate the rest of the threat: he—Multiplane officially, but mostly, directly, him—knew perfectly well what she had done before he hired her, and had the evidence to boot, evidence that was a guilty verdict suspended for only so long as she worked for him. She lifted an eyebrow at him, achieved a quick smile. “That was a long time ago, Coigne.”
“Three years.”
“On the nets, that’s eternity. Besides, our cracker wasn’t Trouble.”
Coigne looked at her for a moment longer, then turned back to the window. “Don’t fuck this up, Cerise.”
Cerise ignored him, and he seemed content to let it go. She turned her head slightly, looked out the smoky window without really seeing the thickening stream of cars that converged on Multiplane’s central compound. It hadn’t been Trouble yesterday, she was sure of it, just someone who’d learned a lot, stolen a lot, from Trouble. But Trouble had been her partner back in the glory days before Evans-Tindale, and that tainted her judgment, in Coigne’s eyes. He wouldn’t believe her until she found the intruder, this cracker who was using Trouble’s programs, and proved that it was someone else. And God help me if my Trouble’s still on-line somewhere, still in the business; I’ll never convince Coigne it wasn’t her. She rejected that thought even as it formed, her lips curving with the start of a smile. Trouble had walked away from the business three years ago. She wasn’t about to reappear now.
The car slowed and tilted, following the flyway as it curved down in a graceful double-spiral that joined the semicircular road that curved in and out of the central compound. There were other cars ahead of them, more of the heavy-bodied black limos that signified junior executive status and were abandoned for more practical vehicles once the rider made it into the boardroom. Coigne frowned quickly, and glanced at his chrono. A shuttle pulled past them into the main building’s terminal—the elevated tracks ran directly into the fourth-floor lobby—and Cerise found herself wishing she had been on it. She was entitled to a car and driver, but rarely took the privilege; she enjoyed the crowds on the shuttle, and the illusion of anonymity, coupled with the certainty of an audience, let her hone her attitude for each day’s work.
The car slowed still further, braked to a crawl as it took its place in line behind an identical vehicle. Coigne leaned sideways—trying to read the license number, Cerise knew, see who it was ahead of him—then settled back in his place, his mouth twisting in a faint, dissatisfied frown. They slid at last into the docking point, and a security guard, soberly suited, but with the mirrored glasses that hid a heads-up display, and at least one minigun concealed in his perfect tailoring, keyed open the door. Two more guards, so closely matched in age, size, and coloring that they could almost have been siblings, waited in the shadows of the door, ready for trouble. Not that there had been that many invasions of transportation engineering firms; that had been reserved for more controversial businesses, biotech and the direct-on-line computer firms; but Cerise was never entirely sorry for their presence. The first guard nodded a greeting, murmured, “Ms. Cerise,” in a voice so soft and deferential that she could ignore it if she chose, and turned his attention instantly to Coigne.
“Excuse me, Mr. Coigne, but there’s a direct-flash for you.”
“Damn.” Coigne scowled at the guard, whose expression didn’t change.
“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s noted urgent.”
Coigne grimaced. “Put it through to one of the cabinets, will you? Cerise—” He stopped abruptly. “I’ll see you upstairs, then.”
“Of course,” Cerise said, and slung her bag more securely onto her shoulder. One of the other guards held the door open for her, and she went into the building, her heels loud on the polished stone floor. She heard the door of one of the communications cabinets that lined the first lobby close behind her, sealing Coigne into its gleaming interior, but did not look back. She rode the moving stair up to the main lobby, where a quartet of well-dressed secretaries staffed a long counter that was as much barrier as service center. Overhead, another shuttle train hummed almost silently along its guidepath, bright against the brown-toned glass that formed the building’s outer shell, and disappeared through the arch that led to the fourth-floor lobby. The massive pillars that supported the rails cast long shadows across the warm-toned floor. Cerise stepped up to the counter and passed her ID disk through the nearest scanner. One of the secretaries, a dark girl who looked barely old enough to have a network license, looked up as the numbers flashed across her screen.
“Good morning, Ms. Cerise. Your meeting’s in conference dining three.”
“Thanks—” For the life of her, Cerise could not remember the younger woman’s name, and compromised with a smile. “When is it scheduled for?”
“You have fifteen minutes,” the younger woman answered, and her own smile in return was faintly conspiratorial.
Cerise nodded, stepping around the barrier, and made her way into the elevator lobby. There were two banks of elevators, one on each side of the shuttle’s guidepath, polished bronze columns that ran the height of the five-story outer lobby and then continued up the outside of the building itself. The express was running to the executive dining levels at the top of the building, where her meeting would be held, but she ignored it, waiting impatiently for a local car instead. It came at last, and she wedged herself in with a dozen or so others, tucking her carrycase carefully under her arm. With luck, she would be able to check in with her own people without being too late for her meeting.
Network Security took up most of the twenty-first floor, a suite of offices around the perimeter and then a maze of cubicles surrounding the protected core where the mainframes and their backups lived. Cerise stepped out of the car into the tiny metal-walled lobby, and waited while yet another security guard passed her ID through his scanner. Only after the machine had cleared her did he
smile and mumble something that might have been a greeting. Cerise nodded—try as she might to accept them as a necessity, the precautions never failed to annoy her—and passed through the heavy door into her domain.
Most of the day staff was already at work, crammed with their machines into their shoebox cubicles. A few were still off-line, drinking a last cup of coffee or going over a hard-print report from the previous night, but most of them were already limp in their chairs, cords plugged into dollie-slots, out on the nets. Everything was as it should be, and Cerise made her way around the perimeter of the maze to her own suite of rooms. The outer door was open, and a dark woman looked up from her keyboard in surprise.
“Cerise. I thought you had a meeting.”
“I do.” Cerise came to stand behind her chief assistant, and stared unabashedly over her shoulder at the screen. “What’s this?”
“Autopsy of that program you found yesterday,” Jensey Baeyen answered. “It’s homebrew, or at best heavily modified commercial. I got a sixty percent probability on the maker, though.”
“What’s the name?” Cerise asked, already knowing the answer.
“Someone called Trouble. Been inactive for a few years, just came back onto the nets in a big way, is what it looks like,” Baeyen answered.
“Who made the match—which data bank, I mean?”
Trouble and her Friends Page 7