Trouble and her Friends

  She made a face at the screen, dumped the information back to the disk, then called up another file. This one contained the latest access codes for most of the East Coast city databases—it was one of those things the wannabes cracked out of the systems and posted, just to prove they could do it—and, as she had hoped, the Seahaven/Southbrook/Sands joint administrative district computer was on the list, less than twenty hours old. The codes indicated that it was an older machine, without the additional security packages that most of the larger cities had installed in the past year. She lifted an eyebrow at that—she would have expected The Willows either to provide the program or at least to insist that the town governments install it—but experience had taught her to be grateful for small mercies. She copied the code, and went looking for her datasieve. She found it at last, on a subsidiary disk, and brought it into working memory, opened it, then stared at the matrix, considering the parameters. This was something that Cerise was particularly good at, designing search routines, and she stood up abruptly, reached for the handset before she could change her mind. There was no point in not contacting Cerise, not now, but she still felt oddly embarrassed by the sudden strength of her need to work with the other woman. She punched in the numbers with more force than necessary, steeling herself for the buzzing of an empty line, and was startled when Cerise herself answered.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Figures,” Cerise said.

  Trouble could hear her relax, and imagined her sudden smile. “I need your help with something,” she said, and Cerise laughed softly.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not on the phone, no,” Trouble answered.

  “Ah. Well, I have some news for you, too,” Cerise said. “Shall I come to you?”

  Trouble looked around the little room, reminded again that Treasury had been there the night before. She had swept for bugs and taps again as soon as she returned, with no result, but Treasury was good. There was no reason to take unnecessary chances. “Probably not,” she said, with some reluctance. “Why don’t I meet you back at your place?”

  “I’ll be expecting you,” Cerise answered, and the line went dead.

  Trouble walked back across the bridge into Seahaven proper, her portable system and the disk-bound toolkit heavy on her shoulder, and threaded her way through the crowd of shoppers along Ashworth Avenue. They were mostly corporate, out on holiday, mixed with a few of the richer locals, and she was glad when she reached the entrance to Eastman House. Cerise had left word at the desk; the attendant, another young woman, sallow and thin, not flattered by the deep red uniform jacket, motioned for Trouble to take the elevator. Trouble nodded her thanks, and went through into the lobby. The elevator came quickly enough—Eastman House didn’t seem to be particularly busy at the moment—and she found herself hurrying down the hallway toward Cerise’s room. She made a face, but did not slow her step until she was right outside the door. She knocked, and was obscurely pleased when Cerise answered instantly.

  “So what’s up?” she asked, and stepped back out of the doorway.

  Trouble followed her in, impressed again by the expensive furniture and the view of the slough and the trees through the enormous window. The sunlight spilled across the carpet, and the tide waters gleamed like steel in the channels of the marsh; the trees were red and gold and green against the sky. Cerise closed the door, and Trouble turned again to look at her, as slim and expensive as the furniture and the view, vivid against the decorous cream walls. She bit down the sudden flood of desire, said, “I’ve got a line on newTrouble.”

  “Have you now?” Cerise said, soft-voiced, and grinned suddenly. “I didn’t find Silk. I left a watchdog, though, that may help.”

  “Mine’s in the real world,” Trouble said. “Mollie says he lives in one of the Headlands apartments.”

  “The fancy towers?” Cerise asked. “How the hell does he afford that?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering, and so have Mollie and Nova,” Trouble answered. “Mollie says she doesn’t think he’s hustling.”

  “And he’s not selling what he takes off the nets,” Cerise said, her eyebrows drawing down into a faint, unconscious frown. “I’d trust Blake to know a hustler when she sees one.”

  “Exactly.”

  Cerise nodded, looked back at Trouble. “So what did you want, sweetheart?”

  Trouble grinned. “I already tried The Willows’ IC(E)—they own the Headlands, did you know that? I didn’t.”

  “I might’ve guessed,” Cerise muttered. “How’s your head?”

  “It’s not my head that hurts, it’s my elbow,” Trouble said, with perfect truth. “I didn’t get very far—I didn’t think it would be smart to push it.”

  Cerise nodded again. “So how do you want to play it?”

  Trouble felt a brief thrill of pleasure. It was flattering for Cerise to assume that if Trouble couldn’t break that IC(E), neither could she; more than that, it was like the old days, the casual trust, making it easier to ask. “I think we’re going to have to go through the city database, and that was always your specialty. You want to help me program the sieve?”

  “God,” Cerise said, “that takes me back. I don’t think I own one anymore, certainly not in this memory.” She gestured vaguely toward her system, snugged up against the main media console.

  “Working in the light’s got you spoiled,” Trouble said. “As it happens….” She let her voice trail off, and slipped the heavy bag from her shoulder.

  “Help yourself,” Cerise said, and went to the console, typed in codes to open the system. After a moment’s search, Trouble found the disk she wanted, and fed it into the drive Cerise indicated. A light flickered on, and Cerise typed the run codes before Trouble could recite them.

  “Your memory’s good,” she said, startled, and Cerise looked up at her, eyes hooded. “You better believe it, darling.”

  That sounded promising, looked promising. Trouble shivered in spite of herself, said quickly, “The code’s already in there, I downloaded it an hour or so ago. It was eighteen hours old then, so it should still be all right.”

  Cerise nodded. “They usually change every twenty-four hours up here,” she said absently, her fingers already busy on the keys, calling up the main program and the search routine. “So. What do we know about this newTrouble.?”

  “He’s young,” Trouble answered promptly.

  “How young?”

  Trouble shrugged one shoulder, thinking. “Under twenty-five, would be my guess, probably younger. Mollie said he looked sixteen, seventeen.”

  “Can I bring it down to twenty, do you think?” Cerise asked, her hands poised over the keyboard. Trouble came to stand behind her, staring at the search screen.

  “Make it twenty-one,” she said, after a moment. “I’ve just got a feeling he isn’t legal yet.”

  Cerise nodded, entered the number in the correct box. “I wonder if he lives alone?”

  “Alone or with one other person,” Trouble said.

  “Yeah, that would be my thought, too,” Cerise said. “Should I be looking for a keeper, maybe put an age restriction on the household?”

  Trouble hesitated, tempted—despite what Blake had said, she had to think that someone was paying newTrouble’s bills—but shook her head. “I have to trust Mollie,” she said. “And she says he’s not a hustler.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not being kept,” Cerise argued, but moved on to the next field. “Profession or professions?”

  “God, I don’t know.”

  “Well, what would you tell the IRS?”

  “As little as possible,” Trouble said. “I don’t know, consultant, maybe? Technical trades/miscellaneous?”

  “You know, I’m inclined to leave it blank for now,” Cerise said. “I’ll use that to sort the results later.”

  “You’re the wizard at this,” Trouble said, with perfect truth, and Cerise smiled up at her.

&
nbsp; “I know.”

  “And modest, too,” Trouble said, not quite under her breath. Cerise laughed, and turned her attention back to the screen. She worked quickly now, pausing only to ask a quick question now and then. Trouble did her best to answer, but knew that her responses were less than adequate. When at last Cerise was finished, she leaned back in her chair, shaking her head.

  “I’m going to get at least thirty names out of this, even restricting it by location, maybe as many as fifty. How’re we going to sort it out?”

  “I don’t know,” Trouble admitted. “I liked your idea of sorting by profession—”

  “Assuming that newTrouble lists himself as something technie,” Cerise said. “What do you call yourself, sweetie?”

  “A syscop,” Trouble answered.

  “Before, I meant.”

  “I know.” Trouble looked away from the screen. In the old days, she had described herself on the government forms as a clerk-typist, freelance; Cerise had called herself a grade-three secretary, Trouble remembered, and not for the first time wondered if the other woman had actually trained as office staff. She said, “There must be a way we could check it out—or we could just hand it over to Mabry as is, I suppose.”

  “You don’t sound any more eager than I am,” Cerise said. “Well, I wouldn’t feel like I was living up to my part of the bargain,” Trouble said. “And I really don’t want him to think that way.”

  “Yes,” Cerise said. She frowned at the screen, touched more keys to dump her responses into the main search matrix. “Let me start this running, then we can talk.”

  Trouble nodded, stayed leaning over the other woman’s shoulder to watch as Cerise keyed in the first series of access codes. The regional database prompts appeared after a moment, and she keyed in the next codes. Even working off the wire, completely outside the nets’ virtual space, her work was precise and efficient, and Trouble caught herself watching again in fascination. Cerise found the main search program almost at once, and touched more keys to insinuate her own program, replacing the preset parameters with her own datasieve. There was a momentary hesitation, and then the system accepted her override. The screen went blank, the prompts replaced with a holding pattern. Trouble eyed it warily—she distrusted anything that tied up a machine long enough for the authorities to complete a trace, no matter how necessary she knew it to be—and Cerise pushed her chair away.

  “This is going to take a while,” she said. “You want a drink?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Trouble watched her move to the low cabinet, touch her thumb to the cheap lock and open the main compartment. “Wine?”

  Cerise turned back to her, already holding two half-sized bottles. “The glasses are in the bathroom.”

  “How elegant,” Trouble said, but went to collect the tumblers. The sinkboard was cluttered with familiar items, brush, toothbrush, a dozen black-lacquer containers of makeup, all the same expensive brand Cerise had always used. Some things don’t change, she thought, and brought the glasses back out into the main room. Cerise handed her one of the bottles, accepted a glass, and they poured the wine in companionable silence.

  “Well,” Cerise said, after a moment, and held up her glass in silent toast.

  Trouble matched the gesture, old habit, tasted the wine cautiously. It was better than they had ever been able to afford—better than she had been able to afford on her syscop’s salary—and she took a longer swallow, savoring it.

  “Expense accounts are a wonderful thing,” Cerise said, with a rather bitter smile.

  “Useful, certainly,” Trouble said. “Is Multiplane really going to pay for all this?”

  “It’s on their account,” Cerise answered.

  The silence returned, broken only by the occasional whirring of the machine’s main drive as it accessed some other part of the program. Cerise turned to look at the screen, grateful for the interruption, saw that the holding screen had been replaced by something else, and went to see to it. Trouble trailed behind her, still holding her glass of wine, watched over the other’s shoulder while she stored the file—a massive one, Trouble saw without surprise—and extricated herself from the system. Cerise didn’t look up when she had finished, but recalled the main program and set up a second search routine.

  “Sorting by profession?” Trouble asked after a moment, wanting to break the silence. Cerise nodded, preoccupied, fingers busy on the keys, and Trouble resigned herself to wait. To her surprise, however, Cerise touched a final sequence that dumped the new file into the sort queue, and pushed herself back from the machine.

  “Yeah. I’ve set it up to break the list down by job listing, technie stuff at the top, and so on, but then we’ll have to go over it by hand.”

  Trouble nodded. “Fun.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Trouble stared for a moment longer at the screen, its numbers now replaced by a mindless swirl of color. “How long, do you think?”

  Cerise shrugged. “I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty minutes?”

  “That long.”

  “It’s a complicated file, and a complicated search,” Cerise said, annoyed.

  “Sorry.”

  The silence was less amiable this time. Trouble turned away from the media center, frowning slightly, found Cerise scowling back at her from across the room. Trouble felt her own frown deepening, temper rising in response to Cerise’s irritation, wondered suddenly what had happened to the ease they had felt—was it only that morning? I’m not letting this happen again, she thought, smoothed her expression with an effort. She took another swallow of the wine, said, “I did miss you.”

  Cerise’s eyebrows flicked upward in surprise. It was on the tip of her tongue to remind Trouble that she had been the one who left—but she’d said that before, and Trouble had apologized, too. “Well,” she said. “I missed you, too.”

  It was her turn to sound unreasonably annoyed, and Trouble laughed softly. Cerise stared at her for a moment, then, reluctantly, smiled back “So now what?” she asked, and Trouble put her glass down, took a step toward her.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Ah,” Cerise said, and put her own glass aside. “Well.”

  “Back rub?” Trouble asked, too brightly, and Cerise grinned.

  “No. Come here.”

  Trouble held out her arms instead, and Cerise moved toward her as though hypnotized, caught Trouble in a firm embrace. Trouble returned the hug, awkwardly, hampered by the other woman’s hold, and was very aware that Cerise was staring up at her, still grinning, daring her to pull away. They were close in height, but Trouble was the taller; she clung to that illusion of advantage as Cerise worked one arm free, reached up to tilt the other woman’s face down to meet her own lips. Her kiss was momentarily chaste, lips closed and cool, deliberately so, and she smiled again as Trouble’s eyes flickered closed.

  Trouble caught her breath, pulled away for an instant, a familiar ache beginning between her legs, set one hand deliberately on Cerise’s breast, feeling the nipple hard beneath her palm, distinct even through the fabric of her shirt and bra. The bra was a surprise—Cerise had never used to wear one before, but then, they had both filled out since the old days, gotten older, gotten better—but the rest was startlingly familiar. They made their way into the bedroom somehow, locked in a stumbling embrace, still competing to end up on top because that was what had always turned them on, fumbled with shirts and jeans until at last Cerise sprawled back against the pillows. She was naked to the waist, shirt discarded somewhere on the floor, bra tangled under her, jeans half unbuttoned already, and Trouble sat back on her heels, too caught by the swell of breast and belly for a moment to even think of shrugging out of her own clothes. She had forgotten, somehow—had always forgotten, had always relearned, each time she saw Cerise naked—just how fine her body was, the alabaster skin and the dark brown-pink aureoles, the sleek black hair now tousled around her face.

  “Come here, then,” Cerise said, and reached for the ta
ller woman, drawing her down against her own embrace. Trouble came to her willingly, wrapping arms and legs around her, grunted in surprise as Cerise rolled deftly, so that she straddled Trouble’s hips.

  “My turn,” Cerise said, and Trouble let herself be peeled out of the tangle of shirt and bra. Cerise slid her fingers under the waistband of Trouble’s jeans, fingers cool against hot skin, then, suddenly impatient, tugged the zipper open, dragged jeans and underwear down around Trouble’s hips. Trouble arched upward, ready to cooperate, but Cerise left the material where it was, tangled just below Trouble’s crotch, and leaned forward, drawing her breasts down the other woman’s body. Trouble whimpered softly—it had been a long time, too long—and she should know better, should stop now, but Cerise’s touch dissolved all thoughts of safety. She pulled Cerise down hard against her. Cerise grinned—Trouble could feel the movement of her mouth against her breast—and slid her hand down between Trouble’s legs. Trouble closed her eyes, giving herself up to the sensations, the too-slow touch, easing between her labia, thumb circling her clit while a finger pressed and entered her. Cerise mumbled something, sounded approving, tongue busy on Trouble’s right nipple, and Trouble whimpered again, wriggling to try to get the busy fingers just where she needed them. For a moment, it seemed as though Cerise would ignore her, worse, had forgotten, but then her hand shifted, fingers settling to a familiar rhythm, and Trouble let herself be carried away, shuddering to her climax against Cerise’s hand.