“No one is more aware of that than I, Mr. Ambassador,” Javna said.
“I’m pleased to hear that, Ben,” Narf-win-Getag said. He nodded and turned to go.
“But I should warn you that even when she comes in, she may not agree to be turned over to you,” Javna said.
Narf-win-Getag stopped mid-stride. “Come again?” he said.
“She may not agree to take part,” Javna said. “As an American and UNE citizen, she has rights. We can’t compel her. We can strongly suggest to her the importance of taking part in the coronation ceremony. But when push comes to shove, we can’t make her do it.”
Narf-win-Getag stared at Javna for a time, and then Javna heard the low, gutteral rumbling that he knew was the Nidu analogue to a good, hearty laugh. “You know, Ben,” Narf-win-Getag said, after his rumbling had subsided, “humans never fail to amuse and amaze me. You’re all so busy tending to your own personal tree that you don’t look around to see that the forest is on fire. It’s very honorable that you would maintain that this young woman has a choice in this matter. But if you’ll allow me to be frank with you, in about a week of your time, our coronation ceremony has to take place. If it does not take place at the appointed time, then any Nidu clan can formally assert its right to the throne, and I can assure you that many are ready. Nidu will be plunged into civil war, and it’s entirely likely—indeed, I would suspect highly probable—the Earth and her colonies will not be able to sit on the sidelines and watch the carnage unaffected. If I were Secretary Heffer—or President Webster—or you, rather than worrying about Miss Baker’s rights, I’d be worrying about my responsibilities to my planet and its well-being.”
“That sounds ominous, Mr. Ambassador,” Javna said.
Narf-win-Getag chuckled, human-style. “Nonsense, Ben. I am merely suggesting what I would do. You may of course see things differently. Hopefully, our young female friend will show up soon and all this will be proven to be idle and pointless speculation. In the meantime, however, I would hope you would do us—do me—the courtesy of forwarding all the information you have on Miss Baker. Perhaps my people will find something there that will allow us all a satisfactory resolution to our present troubles.”
“Of course, Mr. Ambassador,” Javna said. “I’ll have that sent over immediately.”
“Excellent, Ben. Thank you for your time.” Narf-win-Getag nodded toward his glass. “And thank you for the drink.” He left.
Javna went over to the glass, picked it up, sniffed it. No lizardy smell. He slugged it back and as he did so felt like the house butler sneaking booze from his master’s liquor cabinet. He set the glass down with prejudice.
This whole thing stinks, he thought. Javna knew he was being jerked around. He just didn’t know by who and for what reasons. The only power he had—the only power it seemed like the entire government had—was a negative power: The power to hide the object of desire. The power to hide Robin Baker.
“They’re off the train!” Archie yelled back to Acuna, who was on the communicator with Jean Schroeder.
“Where?” Acuna yelled back.
“Benning Road,” Archie said. “Dogstown. Do you have any idea why they’d go there?”
Acuna didn’t. Jean Schroeder did.
Fixer was in the back of the shop doing inventory when he heard Chuckie bark. He glanced up at his clock; just past closing time. He knew he should have locked the door before he came back. No help for it now. He set down his tablet and came out onto the shop floor to see Harry Creek and some lady standing there. Both of them looked like total hell.
“Hello, Fixer,” Creek said. “I have need of your services.”
Fixer grinned in spite of himself. “Of course you do,” he said, and laughed. “Well, well,” he said. “I was wondering what this would be like. Now I know.”
“Now you know what?” Creek asked.
“What it’s like when the other shoe drops, Mr. Creek,” Fixer said. “Because if I’m not mistaken, it’s just come down with a big goddamn thunk.”
chapter 9
“Tell me what you need,” Fixer said.
“We need new identities,” Creek said. “We need off the planet. We need it fast.”
“How fast?” Fixer asked.
“The next couple of hours would be nice,” Creek said.
“Oh, okay,” Fixer said. “Because for a minute there I thought you might want something impossible.”
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Creek said.
“Any extenuating circumstances I should know about that might make this even more difficult?” Fixer said.
“People just tried to kill us. And there’s an APB out for our arrest,” Creek said.
Fixer arched his eyebrow at Creek. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with what just went on at the Arlington Mall, would it?”
“It might,” Creek admitted.
“Well, aren’t you just a bundle of fun,” Fixer said.
“Can you help us?” Creek said.
“For what you’re asking, I don’t think you can afford me,” Fixer said.
Creek reached into his wallet and pulled out the anonymous credit card Javna had given him.
“Try me,” Creek said.
Archie stood in front of the vending machine, steeling himself.
“Just do it,” Archie said to himself. He’d already fed the credit card into the machine; all he had to do was press the B4 button and have done with it.
He was having a hard time doing it. After three previous sessions with the vending machine ripping the information out of his head like a jaguar raking his optic nerves with its claws, he was not exactly brimming with enthusiasm for session number four.
Not only that, but the B4 slot of the vending machine was now empty—he was now spending money to get a migraine and getting nothing for it.
Actually, though, Archie was okay with that. The pain induced with each packet of white chocolate M&Ms was great enough to make Archie physically ill at the thought of ingesting another single piece of candy. This state of affairs no doubt would have pleased Ivan Pavlov immensely.
“Just do it,” he said again, and leaned his head on the Plexiglas, and attempted to will himself to press the button. Acuna had divulged the likely whereabouts of Creek and Baker and was busily medicating himself enough to be able to head out and get them; it was information Archie was certain Sam and the others would want to know. And yet there he was, busily not pressing the button. What he was doing, forehead pressed against the Plexiglas, finger hovering over the B4 button, was thinking of new and innovative ways to strangle Sam for doing this to him. One should expect one’s partner in all things domestic and carnal to have just a little bit more sympathy.
“Hey, geek!”
Archie jerked his head up with a start and moved his body fractionally, enough that the finger hovering over the B4 button jammed into it. Archie gasped as the blinding pain ripped through his head for the fourth time that day and struggled mightily to remain standing. Archie became aware he was suddenly drooling; he desperately tried to suck it back into his mouth and to keep from vomiting all over the front of the vending machine. He closed his eyes and waited for the nausea to pass. When he opened them, Acuna was standing next him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Acuna asked.
“Headache,” Archie said, wetly. “I get them pretty bad. It’s an allergy thing.”
Acuna looked Archie up and down for a moment, sizing him up. “Yeah, well, look. You’re coming with us. Schroeder says that guy Creek and the girl are going to visit has a lot of computer and technical shit at his place. If Creek and the girl aren’t there, and the guy isn’t useful, we might be able to get something out of his computers.”
Archie nodded, eyes still closed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to need a couple of minutes, though. I need to do a couple of things before we go. I need to set some drillers to get into Creek’s computer system.”
“You’re still not in
that yet?” Acuna asked.
Archie shook his head—slowly. “The man’s got some unbelievable defensive software on his system. It’s military grade at least.”
“Fine,” Acuna said. “I have to numb myself a little more anyway. But make it fast.” Acuna looked over to the vending machine and frowned. “What did you get?”
“What?” Archie asked.
“You pressed a button but I don’t see anything at the bottom.”
“I accidentally pressed B4,” Archie said. “It’s empty. I meant to press B5, but you startled me.”
Acuna snorted. “Try G2,” he said. “It’s got aspirin in it.” He walked off. Archie stood there for a few more seconds, then dully pulled out his credit card, slipped it into the vending machine, pressed “G2”, and retrieved his packet of pain reliever.
Back at his computer, Archie considered the problem of Creek’s computer system, which was, he had to admit, just a fucking masterpiece of defensive security. Archie had been flinging driller after driller at the thing, each of the autonomous programs designed to hunt out specific areas of weakness in the system’s security, drill into them, and then hold the door open for other programs to extract data.
Your average home system would fall in about 15 seconds with a minimally complex driller that was essentially a password generator, with a spoofer to fool the system into thinking each password entered was the first attempt. Small business systems and home systems of people who worked in the computer industry or who were simply paranoid about their home systems required a more specialized driller, with more subtle ways of getting in.
On this medium level of complexity, Archie liked a driller that mimicked the information retrieval protocol used across the network—the driller would fool the system into thinking it had requested information and stream a self-extracting program into the system, which would root around and send data back out, piggybacking on the system’s legitimate outward bound traffic.
Now, larger business and government systems, heavily protected as they were, required awesomely designed drillers capable of multidimensional, simultaneous system attacks. Corporate-grade drillers were the state of the art; the hack who coded one that laid into a well-defended system would be king among the hack geeks for at least six hours, which was typically the amount of time it took IT to dislodge the driller and backhoe the hole in the system’s security.
Archie had done Creek and his system the professional courtesy of assuming a low-level driller wouldn’t cut it, and had begun probing his system with mid-level drillers, all of which reported back failure. Archie only had one high-level driller in his archive, but it was a doozy; it had famously drilled open the USDA system and ferreted out the crop forecasts for the year, leading to a collapse in the agricultural futures market. Archie hadn’t written the driller, but he respected the hell out of the coding skills of the hack who had; the driller was elegantly designed. The USDA driller would be useless for any major corporate or government target, of course—on that level, a driller only works once—but it should have been more than enough for any home system on the planet. It wasn’t.
If Archie had six weeks and nothing else to do, he might have been able to whip up a new driller of similar quality as the USDA one; as it was he had six minutes. So he elected to take another tack. He fired up a new window and logged into Basher’s Dungeon, a hack forum, and posted a message as Creek taunting the hacks therein and proclaiming his system as hackproof. Such a taunt wouldn’t dislodge serious hacks, but it would get some of the less skilled and more excitable hacks moving, and once their attacks starting bouncing off Creek’s system, some of the more competent would sense the system as a legitimate challenge. To sweeten the deal Archie wrote that inside Creek’s system was the long-rumored, never-seen video of a famous pop star going down on her not-famous-but-equally-hot identical twin sister.
That should work, Archie thought, and sent off the message. Then he reached into his archives and pulled out a monitor program and a retrieval program. The monitor program would observe the various attacks on Creek’s system from the outside by tagging drillers and other programs as they reached Creek’s system and then tracking their progress against it. When one of them cracked the system, the monitor program would alert the retrieval program, which would enter and grab information.
Archie was obviously no longer looking for Robin Baker’s identity, but if Creek and the girl slipped away again, the information they found could help track them down. Archie directed the retrieval program to focus on personal information documents and all activity within the last couple of weeks. That was bound to be a lot of material but Archie could trim it down once he had it, and it was better than trying to download every file in the system.
Acuna stepped into the room. “Time to go,” he said. “Wrap it up.”
“Already wrapped,” Archie said, and closed his computer. Let’s see you handle this, Creek, he thought.
Brian noticed the hack drillers plinking at Creek’s system the same way a musk ox notes a swarm of flies buzzing around its nose. He warded off earlier attacks from what he assumed was a single anonymous source, but he noticed that these new drillers were both substantially less sophisticated than the previous attacks and coming from multiple, nonanonymous sources. So whoever was bothering him now was both stupid and clumsy. Brian left the diggers to their futile work and sent scouts of his own back down the pipe to the originators’ systems (unsurprisingly easy to crack) and looked through their logs to find what they all had in common. What they had in common was a recent visit to Basher’s Dungeon. Brian appropriated one of their identities, signed on, and found the post claiming to be from Creek.
That’s sneaky, Brian thought. While he didn’t approve of the attack on Creek’s system (which was, in a manner of speaking, an attack on Brian himself), Brian could appreciate whomever it was trying to get other people to do his dirty work for him.
Brian’s attention came back to the attacks on Creek’s system; more complex diggers were arriving now, these from anonymous sources. The smarter kids had arrived, with their shiny toys. Brian wasn’t concerned that they would drill the system, but if too many drillers arrived, defending the system would eventually and inevitably tax its resources, and Brian had other things to do today than play with the hacks.
Brian reached out and grabbed one of the simpler drillers, generating a trapping program on the fly to do so. He cracked it open and spilled the code; it was nothing special, but it featured what Brian was looking for—the hacksig of its maker, one OHNSYAS69, more prosaically known as Peter Nguyen of Irvine, California. Brian learned with one sweep through Nguyen’s system that Peter Nguyen was 15, had an extensive collection of busty porn, and was a budding if clearly not gifted hack; his driller was all off-the-shelf code, jammed together inelegantly into a barely functional program.
Peter Nguyen, I’m going to make you a star, Brian thought, and from the inelegant mess that was young master Nguyen’s drilling program, crafted something new under the virtual sun: A metadriller, designed to latch onto other drilling programs, crack them open, find the hacksig of their makers, and then reprogram the drillers to head home to their maker’s system. After drilling the system open, they would broadcast the availability of its contents onto the world network for anyone to see and sample. A few hours later, the driller would initiate a system crash that included the driller program itself, leaving only Peter Nguyen’s hacksig behind.
Drilling the drillers would be simple, for the simple reason that no one had ever done it before, so no one had thought to protect the drillers from being drilled. This is what Brian loved about hacks. They were smart, but they didn’t like to think about things not directly in front of them.
Brian finalized the code (making sure the metadriller would self-wipe if drilled itself; wouldn’t do to fall into the same trap as the hacks) and then fed it into an autonomous replicator program that would spit out a metadriller each time Creek’s system registered a
n attack. Native system resources spent on dealing with the attacks would now be limited to pinging the replicator program after each attempt. As a bonus, the hack world would fall into chaos and ruin for a certain amount of time while the geeks tried to figure out what the hell was going on.
That was just fine with Brian. He might be a disembodied virtual consciousness, but at least he wasn’t some fucking geek. Maybe deprived of their systems, some of these geeks might go out and get some sun or meet people or something. It couldn’t hurt. In any event, the hacks might learn a little humility, which they were sorely lacking despite the fact they couldn’t be relied upon to shower more than one day out of three.
As Brian contemplated the enforced socialization of the geek set, he noticed two programs—not drillers—hanging about his system’s periphery. The first flitted from driller to driller, marking each with a tiny autonomous program; Brian recognized it as a monitor program. The other program hung there, unpacked. Brian reached out, grabbed it, cracked it open. It was a retrieval program, waiting for a driller to finish its work before entering Creek’s system. Brian read the code and discovered who was trying to get inside of him.
“Well, hello there, Mr. Archie McClellan, whoever you are,” Brian said. “I think it’s time we got better acquainted.”
Fixer opened a freezer in his basement and pulled out an economy-sized Popsicle box, like you’d buy in a warehouse store, and held it for Creek and Robin to examine. “Here it is,” he said.
“Here is what?” said Robin.
“Your new identity,” Fixer said.
“We’re going to be Popsicles?” Robin said.
Fixer grinned. He set the box down on the table and slid out a plastic tray from its inside; on it was what looked to be extremely thin, arm length gloves. “I don’t want you to think I’m glad you came to me,” Fixer said. “Because, truly, I am not. However, your decision was either smart or lucky for you. From time to time the Malloy family has the need to get someone past the authorities quickly and get them offworld for a nice, long, relaxing vacation. And when they do, they come to me, because I have this”—he pointed to the gloves—“a new identity in a box.”