Trouble lay still for a long moment, savoring the slow relaxation, the warmth of Cerise’s hand still cupped against her vulva, the weight of the other woman’s body sprawled half across her, head tucked comfortably just above her breast. She ran her hand down Cerise’s spine, felt the other woman shift slightly, as though she would have purred. And then the handset beside the bed beeped gently, echoed an instant later by a louder buzz from the media console.
“Fuck,” Cerise said, her mouth still against Trouble’s breast.
“We just did that,” Trouble said, unable to resist.
“You may have done,” Cerise said, and twisted free of Trouble’s embrace, reaching for the handset.
“So don’t answer,” Trouble said.
Cerise glared at her, and lifted the handset. “Yes?”
Trouble rolled onto her side, automatically pulling up her jeans, and grimaced at the soggy fabric between her legs. She had been stupid, and the knowledge of it chilled her to the bone. She didn’t believe in taking chances, not when she knew the odds, not even with Cerise. “Who is it?” she asked, and Cerise mouthed, Mabry. Trouble groaned softly, and reached for her shirt, began disentangling it from her vest. What they’d done was relatively safe, but gloves would’ve been safer, and she found herself staring at Cerise’s delicate hands, looking for cuts. Three years was a long time, long enough for anything to happen.
Cerise said aloud, “Yes, we have some of the information you were looking for.” She stopped, listening, and made a face. “Yeah, why don’t you come on up?” She listened again, nodded, and said, “All right.” Trouble rolled her eyes, and Cerise put the headset down with exquisite care.
“Hell, Cerise,” Trouble said.
“You think you’re disappointed?” Cerise said, and reached for her clothes. “You owe me, sweetheart.”
“No problem,” Trouble said, and meant it. “When’s he coming?”
“He’s on his way,” Cerise said, and gave a rueful smile. “Timing is everything.”
They managed to dress before Mabry knocked at the door, but only just. Trouble ran her fingers through her hair, well aware that it was even more disheveled than usual, and Cerise gave herself a disapproving look in the mirror as she went to answer the door.
“You said you had something for us?” she asked even before Mabry was fully into the room.
Mabry looked around once, eyebrows lifting in what might have been amusement. Trouble glared at him, daring him to say anything, and the big man looked away.
“You wanted to see more examples of newTrouble’s work,” he said. “I brought some. You said you had something for me?”
“It’s just finishing,” Trouble said, without looking at the screen.
“We have a rough address,” Cerise said. “It’s just a matter of narrowing it down.”
“That’s very good,” Mabry said, in what seemed to be genuine surprise. “I’m impressed.”
“It’s nice to have friends,” Trouble said.
“So,” Cerise said. “What have we got?” She crossed to the media center and leaned over the screen, frowning slightly. Trouble moved to join her, saw the list of names now neatly sorted by probabilities, and looked back at Mabry.
“Can I see your disk?”
Mabry handed it to her silently, and she stooped to collect her own carryall, discarded on the floor by the media center.
She seated herself on the couch, stretching to reach a power node, and hastily rigged a working system. She slipped the disk into a drive, flipped through the files. Most of them were Treasury or Eurocop dissections of viruses or intrusion techniques, but a couple were straight transcripts of intrusion and pursuit. Those she paged through more slowly, frowning more deeply now. She was only dimly aware of the click of keys as Cerise worked her way through the list, or of Mabry still standing by the main door, hands shoved deep into his pockets. There was something familiar about the hand in the files, something familiar about the way the programs were constructed and the way newTrouble approached a job—not just that he had stolen from her work, that she could see and discount, torn between annoyance and flattery. But there was something about the stranger, about one exchange between newTrouble and a pursuing syscop—the flare of an icon, an exchange of insults, and then the quick and contemptuous disappearance—that reminded her of something, someone, she could not quite place. She ran her fingers through her hair, flipped back to an earlier file, looking for a file that dissected one of newTrouble’s icebreakers. The autopsy was well done, more sophisticated than the usual run of cops’ work, and she went through it slowly, line by line. This was familiar, too, though not quite in the same way as the intrusion she had been tracing; this time, at least, she could put a name to the model.
“This is the Mayor’s work,” she said aloud, and was startled when Mabry answered.
“The Mayor? Of Seahaven?”
“It can’t be the Mayor’s,” Cerise said, ignoring Mabry. “He’d never give anything of his to newTrouble.”
“It’s still the Mayor’s work,” Trouble said.
“Surely he—newTrouble—could have stolen it?” Mabry asked.
Trouble shook her head as Cerise came to join her, leaning down over her shoulder to study the little screen. “You don’t steal from the Mayor,” she said. “First, he’d never forgive you, would hunt you to the day you died—”
“Which wouldn’t be very far off,” Cerise said.
“—and, second, you’d have to break his IC(E) to do it.” Trouble shook her head again. “The Mayor—virtual-Seahaven’s his own private fortress. There are parts where he doesn’t need IC(E), the programming is so idiosyncratic. Nobody’s ever stolen anything from him. Not anything important.”
“That is the Mayor’s hand,” Cerise said, leaned further forward so that her arm was resting on Trouble’s shoulder.
Trouble was briefly aware of the scent of her, sex and sweat and perfume.
“Take a look at this one,” she said, and touched the controls to recall the first file. “It looks like the Mayor, too, a little, but there’s something else….”
“It reminds me of Silk,” Cerise said.
“Silk?” That was Mabry again, moving in from the doorway.
Cerise brushed past him to retrieve a disk from the media center. “Take a look at this,” she said, and handed it to Trouble.
Trouble took it, fed it into the secondary drive, and waited while the machine absorbed the contents. There was a lock on the main file, and Cerise leaned past her, breast nudging against her shoulder, to touch the codes that released it. Trouble nodded her thanks, and opened the file. It was a work-in-progress, blocks of as-yet-unwritten code replaced with cryptically labeled placeholders, but the basic intent was clear enough. It was a display program, mostly iconage, but married to the bones of a decent-looking icepick: a show-off program, Trouble thought, the sort of thing kids wrote, to prove what they could do. It would work its way through someone’s IC(E)—probably without alerting security; even in the skeletal state, she could see that it was a pick, not a hammer—and then, in the heart of a supposedly secure system, unfurl its iconage. And probably something else, too, she realized suddenly, looking at the missing pieces of code. There was certainly a place for a viral payload.
“It’s a clever piece of work,” she said aloud. “And it looks like newTrouble, all right. What’s good is brilliant, but there’s some sloppy work around the edges.”
“He’s added code he didn’t write,” Mabry said. “See, there and there, those timers—and he hasn’t bothered to integrate it.”
“I got this,” Cerise said, deliberately, “out of Silk’s space. Silk’s work.”
“You think they’re the same person?” Trouble asked.
Cerise closed her eyes, trying to recapture the feeling of the first intrusion, her sense of that hand, compared it to the sense she’d had of Silk, in their two meetings. Bearing in mind that Silk had meant to hustle her, had overlaid her
—his?—program with deliberate seduction, while the intruder had been after other game—yes, there had been a hint of Trouble, her own Trouble and the impostor’s version of that hand, in Silk’s approach. It was, she acknowledged, one reason she had fallen for it so easily. “Yeah,” she said aloud. “Yes, I think so.”
“And there’s a connection to the Mayor as well?” Mabry asked. His voice was tight, controlled, and Cerise looked warily at him.
Trouble said, still looking at the screen, “If he’s using the Mayor’s routines, the Mayor sold or gave them to him. I’m sure of that.”
Cerise nodded, but her eyes were still on Mabry. Mabry smiled, turned away from the couch, and leaned in over the screen set up below the media center. “How is your list set up?” he asked.
Cerise followed him, frowning now. “By profession, technie stuff first, then by age and number in household within each category.”
“Run me a search, will you?” Mabry asked. “By co-lessor or primary leaseholder, probably the leaseholder. The name is Eytan Novross.”
Cerise lifted an eyebrow, but did as he asked, saying, “Who’s Novross?”
Mabry smiled, not pleasantly. “Eytan Novross is the Mayor of Seahaven.”
Trouble set her machine aside and came to join them, resting one hand on the back of Cerise’s chair. “I thought nobody knew who the Mayor was, realworld.”
“We’ve known for years,” Mabry said. “We just couldn’t—can’t—prove anything against him. The space that Novross runs is perfectly clean, or has been every time we’ve gained access. But it is Seahaven, and he’s the Mayor, there’s no question about it.”
“Do you think he’d be stupid enough to have an obvious connection with newTrouble?” Trouble asked.
“It’s worth a try, at any rate,” Mabry said, and there was something in his voice that made Trouble look sharply at him. He knew something, all right, something that he wasn’t telling—
“Got it, by God,” Cerise said. “Look there.”
The record filled the screen, drawn perhaps from census, perhaps from the tax forms, the record of owner and inhabitants of one of the Headlands apartments. Not the most expensive of the buildings, Trouble saw without surprise, but not the cheapest, either. And even the cheapest of those flats were worth more than she could afford. Eytan Novross was listed as the owner, a further screen indicating that he paid taxes and mortgage promptly and without complaint; the occupant, however, was listed as James Tilsen, student. “He’s seventeen,” she said aloud, and Mabry shrugged.
“We figured he was young.”
Not that young, I didn’t, Trouble thought, not really, and bit back the words because they weren’t—quite—true. She had been seventeen when she first made a name for herself in the shadows. It was more that she had forgotten, as she herself had gotten older, just how young the competition would always be. It was hard not to feel a little guilty when you slapped down a rival, if you thought too much about their age….
“You really think this is newTrouble?” Cerise asked.
Mabry nodded again. “Yes. I’m sure of it.”
It was there again, in his voice, the certainty. “You knew this,” Trouble said aloud. “You knew there was a connection.”
Mabry looked at her, heavy face empty of emotion, and Cerise said, “Ah. I think you’re right, Trouble.” Her voice hardened. “Give, Mabry.”
Mabry hesitated a moment longer, grimaced. “We knew that Novross—the Mayor—was paying to house and feed this kid, a kid, anyway. We looked into it pretty thoroughly, of course—the boy was well underage—but everything was scrupulously aboveboard. Novross lives elsewhere—he’s on the move a lot, but he rents in Harborside or by the Parcade, anyplace he can get power for the hardware—and does not, absolutely does not, sleep with the kid.”
Cerise lifted an eyebrow at that, and Mabry scowled, looked fleetingly ashamed. “Do you think that wasn’t the first thing Treasury—and us, too—checked out? They thought—it would have been a good arrest. Tilsen was fifteen when he moved in.”
Trouble looked away, torn. Fifteen was too damn young, most of the time, ninety percent of the time, but she resented the certainty that it would have been the queer relationship that made a conviction certain. If newTrouble had been a girl—if it had been me, she thought, with a sudden chill—it would have been a different matter.
“You mean he’s just being paternal?” Cerise asked, and the disbelief was plain in her voice. “The Mayor?”
Mabry shrugged, looked even more uncomfortable. “There was a sting set up, too, nice young-looking guy. He said Novross nearly panicked when he said he’d sleep with him, told him no in no uncertain terms. Said he was above all that, above sex, but our man thought he was too scared to do it. So, paternal or not, I don’t think he’s sleeping with the kid.”
Trouble looked at him without affection. This was the part of a syscop’s work that she disliked—but that, she told herself, was pure sentiment. NewTrouble, whatever his age, whatever his relationship with the Mayor, had done his best to destroy her and steal her name and reputation. That, in the end, was all that mattered. Still at the moment, her victory felt a little hollow.
“What happens now?” she asked, and Mabry shrugged again.
“I get a warrant, and go see Tilsen,” he said. “With any luck, he brings down the Mayor as well.”
That wasn’t in the bargain, Trouble thought, but Cerise’s eyes were on her, and she said nothing.
“Do you think that’s likely?” Cerise asked, and heard the ambivalence in her own voice.
“Look,” Mabry said, “the Mayor is the source of half of what’s illegal in this sector of the nets—on the nets in general. Seahaven, his Seahaven, is worse than the City of London for data laundering. Do you have a problem with shutting him down?”
The two women looked at each other, each one knowing better than to speak for the other, and then Cerise gestured impatiently. Trouble said, “I suppose not. But it’ll be a weird world without Seahaven.”
Cerise nodded.
“Maybe,” Mabry said. He turned away from the media center, stopped again with his hand on the door controls. “One thing, though. If you screw up this arrest, the deal is off.”
“You don’t need to threaten me,” Cerise said.
“It wasn’t you I was talking to,” Mabry answered, and was gone.
When the door had closed behind him, Cerise looked back at Trouble, one eyebrow rising in question. “You weren’t thinking of warning him, were you? NewTrouble, I mean.”
“No, not really,” Trouble said. She sighed, and walked back to the couch, began shutting down the system there. “It’s just—it makes a difference, knowing his name.”
Cerise nodded. “I know.”
“And I never wanted to close down Seahaven,” Trouble said.
“Christ, no.” Cerise took a deep breath. “Except I never liked the Mayor….”
Trouble smiled. “No more do I. But—” She broke off, shaking her head, coiled an errant cable around her fingers. “Damn it, I don’t like the way the net’s changing. I don’t trust these guys who come in out of the bright lights and plan to fix everything, clean up the mess—who knows what they’re going to shut down next, the arts links?”
“You’re overreacting,” Cerise said, and made herself sound certain because she wasn’t sure at all that Trouble wasn’t right.
“You don’t think so.”
“No,” Cerise admitted, after a moment. “But it’s already changed. It changed when the law did, back when you said, when you had the sense to leave. This is just mopping up.”
Trouble nodded, slowly, looked down at the components strewn beside her on the couch to hide the old, still-fierce pain. Cerise was right, of course: that had been why she herself had left the nets, left Cerise, because the virtual frontier had closed, its shadows bounded and mapped by the new web of laws that allowed the realworld to exert its authority. Once, there had been a chance that
the nets, the virtual world, might expand to contain and control the real, but that had ended. All that was left for them was to try to preserve the good things of the nets within the confines of the realworld. “So what do we do now?” she asked, meaning afterwards, and Cerise smiled, deliberately misunderstanding.
“What about a last walk on the wild side?” she asked, and Trouble smiled back, grateful to have her question deflected. “Care for a trip to Seahaven?”
Showdown
12
They walk the nets like the echoes of a dream, icons oddly twinned, disparate but somehow matched. The roads of light glow before them, around them, the datastreams coursing across the black and midnight sweep that is the net itself. The patterns are somewhat different this night, as every night, different in the details, the intersections and nodes where the information is traded, created, recreated, but the greater shape remains much the same. The high-speed lines swirl past, rigid geometry walled in strands of IC(E); corporate preserves loom out of nothing, their public spaces open, deliberately inviting, while discreet IC(E) walls them round, keeping secrets in. It’s a strange feeling, to be together again with no job in hand, just the desire to be out on the nets, and Trouble lets Cerise take the lead for now, walking them down the fields of light. They pass familiar walls, junction nodes they know, that every netwalker knows, from the shadows or the light, and Trouble half turns, expecting them to head down a primary lead, down toward the BBS and the doors that lead to Seahaven.
Instead, Cerise turns a different way, toward a node shrouded in IC(E), and Trouble has to scramble to keep up with her. Cerise pauses, waits, and passes them both through together. There is something familiar about the IC(E), Trouble thinks, but Cerise is already flickering ahead of her, and she has to hurry again to catch up. Cerise’s hand? she wonders. Cerise’s work? But Cerise is in no mood to talk, not now, and Trouble follows, close behind. The IC(E) is tight here, sharp geometry edged with sparks of light, clear and dangerous, and it’s only Cerise’s company that takes them through unscathed. Not that I couldn’t break it, Trouble thinks, even so deep in it, I could break free—but it wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be elegant. And, most of all, it would be more than obvious.
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