Trouble and her Friends

by Melissa Scott

  Mabry made a face, waved the words away. “All right, yes, sorry. But this is important. If we lose the Mayor now, if he gets a chance to run, start over somewhere else—”

  “All right,” Trouble said. “All right.” She closed her eyes, calling up the memory of the Mayor’s virtuality, spaces within spaces, the western town and the Aztec temple that contained the walkway and its mirrors, that in turn contained the last small space, the volume that had vanished with the Mayor. She could almost see it now, the machines and the Mayor merged, and the dull room that contained them, table and lamp and the window that overlooked the Parcade—

  “I can find him,” she said aloud, and felt a surge of glee. He hadn’t beaten her after all; he had betrayed himself instead, and she could prove it. Both Mabry and Cerise were looking at her, Mabry frankly skeptical, Cerise wary, and she grinned at both of them. “The last volume, the one at the very end of the path, Cerise—it was based on his realworld location, I’m sure of it. You wouldn’t construct something like that unless you were copying something real, it was too plain, too mundane for it not to be real.” She broke off, took a deep breath, controlling her excitement. “The point is, there was a window, with a view of the Parcade. If we can find the view, I can find the Mayor.”

  There was another silence, and then Cerise moved, swinging back to the media center, swollen fingers clumsy on the controls. “There’s a tourist mock-up of the town, supposed to let you see what your rooms will be like, what the views will be, that sort of thing.” Her hand slipped, jarring her fingers, and she swore under her breath, scowling at the screen.

  “Let me,” Mabry said, and Cerise stepped reluctantly aside. Mabry finished entering the codes, triggered a three-dimensional model of the town.

  “What did you see?” Cerise asked, and gestured for Mabry to call up the inquiry screen.

  “He was overlooking the Parcade,” Trouble said. “The western end, with the Ferris wheel. There were houses in the way, so you couldn’t see the street itself, just the Ferris wheel.”

  “How many streets?” Cerise asked. Mabry seated himself at the controls, heavy face intent on the screen and the menu of questions.

  Trouble frowned, trying to remember. “Three, maybe? I think there were three rows of roofs, anyway.”

  “How high up were you?” Cerise asked.

  “High,” Trouble answered. “At least two stories, maybe three or four—the nearest building was a little away, you’d be looking down on it.”

  Cerise nodded, looked at Mabry. “Run it, see what it comes up with.”

  Mabry did as he was told. The model vanished, to be replaced by a swirling paisley pattern.

  “Come on,” Cerise murmured, staring at the screen. “Come on.”

  Trouble leaned over Mabry’s other shoulder and willed the holding pattern to clear. After what seemed an interminable time, the paisley swirls vanished, and a message appeared: no exact match available. “Oh, shit,” Trouble said, and turned away.

  “See if there’s a possible location,” Cerise said calmly to Mabry, and the big man touched keys, frowning slightly. The holding pattern reappeared, but only for a moment, then was replaced by a section of the city model—four, maybe five blocks of nondescript houses, on the far side of the Harbormouth bridge, where the solid land fell away into the Slough. A message appeared with it: similar views exist in this approximate area.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Cerise said, and Trouble turned back to the screen.

  “That’s where I’d expect to find him,” she agreed.

  Cerise nodded, studying the image. “A view of the Ferris wheel, you said, and a bunch of housetops.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about there?” Mabry asked, and slid the cursor across the screen to circle a tall rectangle colored the pale green of a rooming house.

  “Why not?” Cerise said.

  Mabry touched keys, and images flickered across the screen as he moved the cursor from floor to floor of the rooming house. All were views from the windows that faced the Parcade; all showed housetops and the Ferris wheel above them in the distance. “Well?”

  Trouble shook her head. “Definitely not there.” She studied the screen, trying to imagine what it would take to transform the images she had just seen to the one she remembered. “What about that one?”

  Mabry touched keys again, calling up the views attached to the house she had selected. Trouble watched them through, but shook her head again. “It’s close, though. Try next door.”

  Mabry worked his way down the street, selecting two more houses, shook his head as the images from the third popped onto the screen. “This of course assumes that he’ll stay put long enough for us to catch him. Even if we find the place, he’ll be long gone.”

  Cerise looked at Trouble, who said nothing, her eyes fixed on the screen. Cerise said, carefully, “I’m not so sure about that, Mabry. There’s no real reason for him to run—he doesn’t know what, if anything, Trouble saw, and he doesn’t know we know Seahaven. He’s been invisible for a long time, and he’s got hardware there—it must be substantial, to run Seahaven. I think he’ll stay.”

  “It would be stupid,” Mabry said, but he sounded slightly more optimistic than he had. “Where next?”

  Trouble pointed, touching a house across the street from the one they had viewed before. “That one.”

  Mabry selected it, ran the images, moving up from the ground floor. Trouble held her breath as the pointer reached the top two floors, relaxed with a sigh.

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re sure?” Mabry asked, but he was already calling up the address.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Trouble answered. “That’s the view I saw, anyway.”

  “That’s near where Blake used to live,” Cerise said, and shook the thought away as irrelevant.

  Mabry shoved himself away from the media center, not bothering to shut down the program. “Your phone? I need to call—”

  “We’re coming with you,” Trouble said, and pointed to the handset resting on the coffee table.

  Mabry picked it up, began punching numbers. “Do you think that’s wise? I thought you had a reputation to uphold.”

  Cerise grinned at that, reached across the keyboard to close down the system. “Oh, we have reputations, all right—”

  “—and I fully intend to keep mine,” Trouble finished. “Nobody crosses me, Mabry. Nobody.”

  “Suit yourself,” Mabry answered, and turned away to speak softly into the handset.

  Cerise looked at Trouble, lowered her voice cautiously. “You sure you’re sure?”

  Trouble nodded again, knowing the question she was being asked. After all this, Cerise was saying, after being dragged back into the shadows and finding out again that she had a taste for it, did she really want to throw herself irrevocably into the bright lights, turn herself into nothing more than a syscop? “I’m sure,” she said, and Mabry tossed the handset onto the couch.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and swept out of the room without looking back.

  Trouble followed, said over her shoulder, so softly Cerise wasn’t for a second sure she had heard correctly, “I want to be in at the kill. If I’ve gone over to the enemy, I want to do it right.”

  Cerise hesitated, shook her head, uncertain of her feelings, or at best sure only of one thing, that she would see this through to the end. She followed both of them down the emergency stairs and out into the lobby.

  Mabry had commandeered a car from the local cops, unmarked but with police equipment, sophisticated net monitors and local tie-ins, prominent on its control boards. There was a driver as well, a skinny, nondescript young man with pale brown hair and a recruit’s flashes below The Willows’ insignia on his shoulder. He looked momentarily as though he might protest, seeing the two women, but Mabry said, “You have the address?”

  The young man swallowed whatever he had been going to say. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let’s go
.” Mabry climbed into the front seat beside the driver, and Trouble and Cerise scrambled into the narrow passenger compartment. “You notified Treasury as well?”

  The driver put the car into gear, edged forward out of the driveway in front of Eastman House. “Yes, sir. They’re on their way.”

  “Good,” Mabry said, and leaned back against his seat. Trouble looked at Cerise, saw the other woman’s pale face intent on the road. Then Cerise looked at her, dark eyes wary, and they both heard the sound of sirens, distant now, but coming quickly closer.

  “What the hell?” Trouble said, softly, and Mabry leaned forward to query one of the systems plugged into the main board.

  “—hostage situation—” The voice blared from a speaker, and Mabry reached hastily for a datacord and plugged it in, cutting oft the voice.

  “Who the hell can he be holding hostage?” Cerise asked. “Not Silk, surely.”

  “Who’d care?” Trouble agreed, her eyes on Mabry.

  The big man glanced back at her, his expression unreadable. “He’s tied into the city computers. Threatens to erase system software if he’s attacked. Can he do it?”

  Trouble nodded slowly, remembering the sheer scale of virtual Seahaven, of the power, hardware and software, that the Mayor needed to maintain the illusion. Turn that power on a city system, and no IC(E) would be sufficient; at that scale, brute force alone would be enough to shatter the city’s coding, leave all the files, all the city systems, open and vulnerable.

  “Does The Willows care?” Cerise asked, with a smile that did not touch her eyes.

  Mabry’s eyes flicked toward her, and then away again. “The Willows is tied in to city services—drainage, the pump system, sewers, traffic control, all that. If Novross crashes those, The Willows doesn’t have sufficient backup power to keep things running.” He turned back to the control board, running one hand along a sensor strip. “Besides, the city systems contain the tax records.”

  “Ah.” Cerise’s smile widened into open contempt.

  The sirens were louder now as they crossed the Harbormouth bridge, and the local cops had set up a hasty road-block halfway down Ashworth Avenue. Other cops were fanning out from the roadblock, moving along the storefronts to shut down the businesses and force the citizens indoors. Out of harm’s way, or, more likely, just out of their way, Cerise thought. Mabry extended his credentials to the waiting cop, a man in full armor under his coveralls, with a stunstick at his belt and a pellet gun slung across his shoulder.

  “Where’s Starling?”

  The cop didn’t answer at once, but studied the folder with its double ID carefully, checking both identification and warrant before he returned it to its owner. “Down by the house,” he said. “He’s directing the operation.”

  “Wonderful,” Trouble muttered.

  Mabry said nothing, gestured to the driver. The young man pulled the car sharply around the end of the barricade, and started down the narrow street.

  The cops had removed some of the parked cars from this end of the road, though they’d left others in place as makeshift barricades. Two fast-tanks were pulled into place across the street, one with its rear treads resting precariously on the soft ground that edged the Slough, the other blocking the roadway entirely. A trio of armored cops—wearing state badges rather than The Willows’ insignia—crouched in its shelter; a fourth man, equally armored, stepped out of its shadow and waved the car to the side of the road. The driver slowed obediently, and Mabry lowered his window to confer with the approaching officer.

  Cerise laughed sharply. “You’d think the man was a fucking terrorist. Look at all this.”

  Mabry glanced back at her, then turned to hand his credentials to the armored man. “Where’s Starling?”

  “Mr. Mabry,” the cop acknowledged, straightened slightly as though he would have saluted. “Mr. Starling wants to see you right away. Down there, sir.” He pointed toward a third, smaller car, recognizable as police only by the way it was parked, slewed deliberately across the road to provide protection behind its bulk.

  “I want to see Mr. Starling,” Mabry said, and levered himself out of the car. “You two, wait here.”

  “Fine,” Trouble said to his back. She watched him make his way down the street, broad-shouldered in his battered jacket, conspicuously casual among the armored and uniformed police huddling behind the cars.

  “What the fuck do they think they’re doing?” Cerise demanded. “He’s a cracker, not a gunrunner.”

  Trouble saw the driver’s shoulders twitch, and a detached part of her admired the man’s self-control. “Yeah,” she said, deliberately provocative, “crackers don’t generally go around shooting cops.”

  Cerise snook her head, still furious. “They got to be crazy, reacting like this.” But that was Evans-Tindale for you: the laws had been written by people who feared the nets, and it was that same fear that made things escalate, spiraling out of control.

  Another siren sounded, a deeper note this time, and Trouble twisted in her seat to stare back the way they’d come. A fire engine, one of the heavy tower trucks with a lift basket on the front and a massive ladder-and-hose station at the back, was making its way ponderously down the street. One of the armored cops shouted and waved, and the driver edged their car in closer to the curb to let the fire engine pass. There were more armored men clinging to its sides.

  “All this for software?” Trouble said. “They’ve got to have backups.”

  The driver turned in his place, pale face very serious. “We can’t let him get away with the threat—we don’t dare let him crash the city systems.”

  “This isn’t going to stop him,” Cerise said. She shook her head again. “This is not how you deal with the net.”

  “They must have somebody trying to stop him on-line,” Trouble said, but her tone was less confident than her words. All this hardware could only be an admission of failure, a desperate attempt to stop something that couldn’t be dealt with in virtuality—and this would have to fail, too, she thought. If the Mayor really did hold Seahaven’s systems hostage, really had gained control of them through the net, then the fastest, most surgically efficient realworld attack would be seconds, minutes too slow. Starling, at least, would know it; she wondered bleakly if any of the others realized just how ineffective they really were.

  “Trouble!” That was Mabry, striding back toward the car, his jacket flying open around him. “Cerise!” He lifted a hand, beckoning, and the driver popped the rear doors.

  “Bet you he wants us to go cracking for him,” Cerise said, and swung herself neatly out of the compartment.

  Trouble followed more slowly. “I don’t make bets on a sure thing.”

  “We have a problem,” Mabry said.

  “No shit,” Cerise murmured.

  Mabry pretended he hadn’t heard. “Novross does seem to have control of the city systems. Starling and his lot have been trying to dig him out for the past half hour.”

  He tilted his head toward a black van that sat behind the line of cars. A cable snaked from a shielded port and disappeared into the door of the nearest building: Treasury’s special netwalkers, Trouble realized.

  “They haven’t made much progress, but they’re still working on it,” Mabry said. “But the main thing is, Novross wants to talk to you.”

  He was looking directly at Trouble, but even so she frowned in confusion. “To me?”

  “To you,” Mabry agreed.

  Trouble looked at Cerise, who shrugged, looked back at Mabry. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Mabry answered. “He’s not precisely forthcoming on the matter. But he wants to talk to you—he says he’ll negotiate with you. And only you.”

  “I doubt that,” Cerise said.

  “She’s right,” Trouble said, and dredged a smile from somewhere. “We’re not exactly on friendly terms. But I can crack his IC(E)—let me in that van, and I’ll get him off the nets.” It wouldn’t be that easy, she knew, would take time and
effort and probably more tools than she had with her, though Treasury might have some of what she would need—

  Mabry shook his head. “It’s not on, Trouble. I’m sorry. Starling thinks his men can handle it, but he needs time. They need time. And Novross wants to talk to you.”

  “He could kill her,” Cerise said sharply. “Did you think of that? Or is that what Starling has in mind?”

  “He’s promised full cover,” Mabry said. Behind him, machinery whined, and the fire engine’s bucket rose jerkily into the air, swinging slightly from side to side. An armored figure was just visible over the edge of the bucket, gauntleted hand cupped to a headset in his helmet. The bucket rose higher, swung slightly sideways, so that the men in the bucket—there were two of them, Trouble realized—had the Mayor’s windows in their field of fire. “And I intend to hold him to it.”

  “Not good enough,” Cerise said.

  “What exactly am I supposed to do?” Trouble asked.

  “Keep him talking,” Mabry answered. “Buy us time.”

  “How?”

  “He said he wants to negotiate,” Mabry said, “so negotiate. Offer him—whatever it is he wants, I suppose. No, offer passage out of the country, then we can haggle over how and where. Try to keep his mind off the nets. He’ll probably have demands of his own, anyway, so see what they are and we’ll go from there.”

  “Great,” Trouble said. “I’m not a fucking negotiator, I don’t know what I’m doing—” And I don’t want to get myself killed, not by the Mayor, not after I’ve won—not for The Willows, anyway.

  “He says,” Mabry said, “and I emphasize I don’t know if it’s true, but he says he has a line to the local nuke. He says he can override local controls, cause a catastrophic failure.”

  “You don’t think he does,” Trouble said.

  “No.” Mabry’s face twisted in a grimace half of frustration, half of rage. “And I don’t think Starling does, either. But it’s fucking useful for him, gives him access to all of this.” He gestured broadly, the sweep of his hand including the tanks and the fire engine and the huddling cops. In the distance, Trouble could hear the beat of a military helicopter, sweeping down from the base to the north. “And I—we can’t afford to take that chance.”