Finally he just visualized the façade of the arcade, and hoped that Nuke would recognize it. Apparently he did.
THAT’S CAESAR’S DEN. GOOD, YOU’RE CLOSE. HEAD WEST FROM WHERE YOU ARE ... HERE.
A map sketched itself out line by line in Phoenix’s head, which meant that Nuke was creating it for him, not just flashing him something from storage. He responded with an affirmative icon, lidded his eyes halfway to shut out the worst of the visual distractions, and began to follow the route indicated.
It was no big surprise that he was soon squeezing between the gaudy tourist shops and gambling dens, to the narrow service corridors which lurked behind them. Autobots rumbled by him, their armored exteriors marked with a small shield which guaranteed that not even a thief with a death wish would try to break into them. All the denizens of the vast station-low-life, high-life, and everything in between—knew better than to screw with the businesses that kept Mama Ra happy. You saw her sigil on a bundle of merchandise, and it was strictly hands off from then on. Which meant, of course, that the small shields with their engraved Guild-sign were themselves worth a bundle ... but a girl had to make her profit somehow, right? Paradise Station was big enough and free enough that there was something on it to make everyone happy, and its grateful tenants policed their own.
The ’bots drove by him, delivering rare foodstuffs to the back doors of restaurants, precious gems to legal and illegal jewelers ... whatever. He stepped aside to keep them from having to slow down as they maneuvered around him. It was a passing token of respect to the woman who ruled them all. Why not? Paradise was a haven for moddies, and he’d been in enough places that weren’t to appreciate what that meant.
A narrow and low-ceilinged avenue gave access to an open space that must have once been meant for storage; certainly it had not been designed for the ragtag assortment of cubicles that had since been stuffed into it. He didn’t even want to know what some of them were here for. The place looked much the same as his own street, truth be told, but he was willing to bet that here, this close to the center of tourist activity, there were far darker goings-on than ever took place in his sector.
The map indicated a door to his left and then blinked out as he put his hand to the lock. Apparently it had been programmed to accept him, for it opened even before the person inside could put a hand to it.
“Hey, Phoenix.” A hand clasp of ritual warmth welcomed him into a dark and somewhat cluttered abode. An office, he guessed, rather than a home, and probably not Nuke’s own. There was too much shit around that wasn’t hacker stuff, and he knew from his time on the net that this guy lived, breathed, ate, and probably even dreamed on the outernet. He’d met Nuke several times before, and always in a place like this, filled with someone else’s stuff. Maybe the guy didn’t even have a real home, Phoenix mused. It was possible. There was a waiting list a mile long for apartments on Paradise Station, and it wasn’t like you couldn’t manage to live without one if you had to. Especially if you had enough friends ... or did enough favors for people that friends weren’t necessary.
“What’s this all about?”
Nuke nodded toward a back door, a cryptic smile on his face. He was pale, pale as the bundles of fiberoptic that coursed through the central processor chamber; you could almost see the veins pulsing blue beneath his eyes and along the side of his neck. No solar chambers for this boy. “She’s in the back room. I’ll introduce you in a minute. What did you think of that stuff I sent you?”
“Damned nasty security shit. That was on her chip?”
“Those were the gateway programs. You haven’t even seen what was beyond that yet.” He glanced toward the back of the room, where the door to the next room waited. “I don’t think she knows. Which means ... shit. Someone programmed all that for her and then didn’t tell her?”
“Maybe it’s stolen.” He said it in a matter-of-fact tone, not much caring whether it was true or not. Theft might complicate this job a bit, but he’d never let a factor like that affect whether or not he took on the project. Leave that to the politicos, who had to pretend they had morals.
“Don’t think so. No proof there, just a gut feeling.” Nuke reached down for a drink box on the table beside him and sipped it dry of its last few drops. It looked like it had been around for quite some time. “Doesn’t look like the type.”
He smiled dryly. “Oh, and you’re a great judge of women?”
“You’ll see. Trust me.”
“So how did she find you?”
“Pawn sector in Green. Not a bad move, actually. Hinted around that she needed some help with unusual programming, someone adaptable, capable of dealing with equipment that had been, well, sorta modified ... like you might find in one of those shops.” He grinned. “I don’t think she knew how loaded that word is around here ... but anyway, Petroy put her in touch with me.”
“Shit, she could be a Pol.”
“Petroy didn’t think so. I trust him. Besides, she was subtle, that’s an after-the-fact summation. Never told anyone what she wanted, just let them understand that she needed ... one of us. They figured it out.”
“So they sent her here? Sheesh. Real discreet, those guys.”
“You don’t deal with them a lot. I do. Sometimes interesting business comes in that way ... hey, some of us really do earn a living, you know? How do you think I find clients?”
Clients. Jesus, that was a laugh. His amusement must have shown on his face, for Nuke’s own colored a bit. “Hey, some of us have a real business, you know?”
He put up his hands in a no-contest gesture. If that was what Nuke wanted to call his online games, so be it. They all had their own pretty names for what they did. He himself was on the Yellow List as a Technology Consultant.
“So does she know I’m helping you?”
“Ah ... sorta ...”
“And sorta not. Okay. So why does she think I’m here? Just passing by and stopped in to say hello ... and oh, do you happen to have any high-security debit chips lying around that I could glance at while I’m here?”
“More or less, yeah.”
“Jesus.” He shook his head in amazement. “You really are something. All right, show it to me.”
“Don’t you want to see the girl first?”
For a moment he just stared at him. Then he realized that Nuke was right. Of course he would want to see the girl first. That was the human thing to do, wasn’t it? “Sure.”
She was in a back room, nursing a drink box of her own. She stood up when they entered, with a kind of awkward politeness that spoke volumes for her lack of experience in this kind of situation. Whatever she’d come to the moddies for, it was pretty clear she’d never done this kind of thing before. Or dealt with this kind of people, he was willing to bet.
“Hey, Kandra, this is a friend of mine. Phe ... Michal.” He stifled a grin at his own near-carelessness as he substituted Phoenix’s real name for his outernet monikker. The name wasn’t something kept a close secret in their crowd, but it wasn’t something he’d want to advertise to every stranger either. THE NAME ON THE CHIP IS JAMISIA CAPRA, he flashed to Phoenix. Phoenix shrugged. If she wanted to use an alias, what the hell. He had several himself—including the one he was now using—and at least half a dozen he’d had to retire because they had a criminal record attached to them. That was the price of being too careless in your youth.
Damn, Nuke had been right about the girl. She was lean and leggy and dressed in some hi-G getup that didn’t hide very much. The fabric was a metal mesh with lots of little holes in it, and he found himself forcing his eyes away from her bustline, where primitive male instinct urged him to search for a hint of rouged flesh at the tips of her breasts. It was a strange response to have—he could stare at nudes any day he wanted, down at the bathhouses—but sometimes the primitive parts of your brain sent out messages that had nothing to do with logic. Which was why he generally preferred cold circuitry.
He forced his eyes up to her face and
saw that she really was very pretty. Rotten haircut, though. Really rotten haircut. What world had considered that a decent style, he wondered. He’d bet she had really pretty eyes when all that silver shit was wiped off; it was hard to focus on them as it was. Strange, how there was no heavy makeup on the rest of her face. It seemed ... wrong, somehow.
“Michal’s good at this kind of thing,” Nuke was saying:
She was a little nervous, he could see that. Probably never did anything like this before. Maybe she was worried that these two unknown guys would take advantage of their isolation, and ... yeah, right. The thought was almost laughable. Still, it was the kind of thought she inspired. Nuke was right, he thought; she was hot.
“Mind if he takes a look?”
She hesitated, then shook her head.
With a brief look of triumph Nuke handed Phoenix the chip. “She’d like to get to her money without the transaction being traced,” he said. His voice made it clear that he had his doubts about whether the money was hers in the first place ... but that went without saying. He nodded toward a little nook in the back comer of the room, which Phoenix could use to work in. Unlike the rest of the apartment, that one spot was clean: a desk without drawers, with the bare essentials of illegal programming arranged upon its surface. Phoenix ignored all that shit and uploaded the chip directly into his head, figuring he had enough safety programs there to handle whatever this thing might have on it. ICON ONLY; he told his internal systems; now they would accept his instructions, but load nothing from the foreign chip into his brainware. It was what Chaos probably tried to do with that killer virus thing, and Warrior also. Usually it worked, and he generally took its efficiency for granted, but in the wake of their deaths he felt a small stirring of nervousness in his own stomach as the chip’s security program began to scroll across his field of vision. Damn it all, you couldn’t let something like this get to you. If you did, you’d wind up in front of a monitor twenty-four hours a day, and that was no way to work. He might as well make his appointment at the terminal recycling center now and save himself the suffering.
He walked over to the alcove and sat himself down on the worn mock-leather seat, shut his eyes, and let the program take over. In the distance he could hear Nuke talking to the girl, her answers voiced in soft murmurs, volume low enough so that she wouldn’t disturb Phoenix’s concentration. Nuke knew better. Nuke knew that when Phoenix was working on something, the whole damn station could come down around his ears and he wouldn’t know it.
The security on the chip was heavy, all right. Anyone trying to use it illegally—even someone with moderate hacking skills—was certain to trip over one part or another. He nearly got caught himself, in an intricate loop-the-loop of passwords and protocol. Periodically he needed information, but rather than stop what he was doing he flashed the question to Nuke, who got an answer from the girl and flashed it back to him. Once she had to flash him something herself, a personal icon embedded in the program. The voice recognition part was especially interesting, with a section of cadence-recognition that was easily ten times the length and complexity of anything he’d ever seen before. He couldn’t figure out the point of it, but it was well done. The whole thing was well done. Whoever did this girl’s programming knew his stuff, and it was a good half hour before he felt confident enough in his control of the chip to move on to the next part of the job.
Nuke had left his notes online, and Phoenix retrieved them. The first problem was that the money was on Earth, which meant that some outstation bank was going to have to make the transfer and then get reimbursed. All of which would take a good three months, allowing for round-trip transmission to that backwater planet. So under normal circumstances, that kind of transfer was going to carry ten times the security of an outworld transaction, which could be confirmed and reconfirmed in seconds. Okay, that he could deal with. The chip was programmed to route through the First Bank of United Terra, which apparently had an office on the Guild’s outstation. Now that must have cost a pretty penny. He rode the skip into there and poked around a bit, making sure that its security wasn’t any more or less than a normal financial office would have. It was, actually—quite a bit more—but not state-of-the-art stuff, more like dinosaur programs that overlapped in function, messy and wasteful bits of programming that had apparently accumulated for centuries without being cleaned up. Well, that was Earth for you. Normally, when he worked the skip, he had to be triply careful, because that meant a delay of a few realtime seconds, which was enough time for a security program to nail you, but this stuff wasn’t even alert enough to take advantage of that.
When he thought he had the lay of the land—and had assigned his password programs to start testing combinations for a few things he was going to need access to—he decided to take a look at the account itself. Security wouldn’t let him get into it without a good deal more work, but he could probably pick up enough peripheral data to tell him how hard the job would be. He didn’t use the girl’s chip to get in, but lifted the data he needed and chose a route of his own. It was always safer that way. He found an accounting program running on automatic, that would let him scan the numbers in her account without letting him change them. Good enough for now. He gave it her account code.
—And every single alarm system he had, from the wires in his head to the nerves twined around them to the primitive instinct of turn and flee, went off simultaneously. He trusted his own instincts well enough to know that meant something nasty was coming down the line, and he broke off contact as quickly as he could, dumping all the code he’d pieced together on the way in. Even that wasn’t fast enough, and he knew it. The skip delay meant he was seconds behind whatever was going on, and only the fact that it was coming from another node gave him any time at all to save himself.
He had routed through Reijik Node on the way in, just for safety. Now he cut that trail short. Even as he did so, he could sense a powerful security sniffer searching for some sign of him, and he nearly tripped over it as he raced to erase the clues it might use to find him. He’d been careful—he was always careful—but he also had known that he wasn’t yet doing anything that should excite this kind of attention, so he had been ... well, maybe a little overconfident. Just a bit. He could feel his body sitting rigid in its chair now, and somewhere in the distance Nuke was asking him, “P? What’s wrong?” He didn’t answer. It took every neuron he had to think as fast as the damned thing that was tracking him, and to stay one step ahead of it.
At last he got it trapped in a logic loop on Reijik. It would figure that out in a minute or two and get itself freed, but at least that gave him time to maneuver. He made up a trail leading back to one of the public gateway programs, and from there sent out a thousand false leads that would bounce around on automatic until something caught up with them. Let the sniffer burn itself out on that job for a while. He took his time making damned sure then that every trace which could lead back to him was erased, and that the path documenting the erasure was erased, and so on and so forth until the constriction in his chest eased and he could breathe freely again. Damn, that was close.
“I’m okay,” he croaked. Not knowing if it was an hour or merely minutes since Nuke had asked him the question. His throat was as dry as chalk. “Get me a drink, will you?”
His brainware had copied a copy of part of the code of the thing which had intercepted him. With care he inspected it now. It was security, all right, and not the normal bank stuff. It wasn’t even connected with the bank, he was willing to bet, but placed there from the outside. And it was one of the most vicious pieces of sniffer programming he’d ever seen.
You have nasty enemies, girl.
At last he let all that stuff fade from his vision, and he opened his eyes again. They were dry, and crusted with stuff he’d squeezed out during that last wild ride. A lot of real time had passed, then, probably while he was doing cleanup. Nuke was standing there with a drink and he reached up and took the box from him gratefully. Some
thing warm and red and nasty was inside, but it wet his tongue and felt good going down.
“You’ve got one hell of a mess surrounding that account,” he said at last. “The bank security isn’t all that bad. I’ve broken into worse. But someone is watching for any activity that touches your account, and whoever it is has set some stuff up that’s damned nasty. Damn nasty.”
The girl shut her eyes for a minute, absorbing his message, and then leaned back in her chair. For a moment she looked weary and utterly disheartened. Did she think just because the job was tough, they wouldn’t help her?
Then that mood passed. It was very strange, almost like a shiver passed through her and left in its wake another set of emotions. And new posture as well: stiffer, more upright, and much less vulnerable. She opened her eyes, and for a moment he had the fleeting impression that it was someone else he was looking at. Someone totally new.
In a tone that was cool and utterly controlled, she said, “So the money’s not accessible.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Her eyes were fixed on him: waiting, hoping. They were the oddest color, a clear blue that didn’t seem like the right color for eyes. Probably not natural, he decided. Then for a moment her gaze became distant, unfocused ... the sure sign of some internal conversation. But she had no headset on, so of course that wasn’t possible. Was it?
Nothing is impossible, an inner voice whispered.
Was she hooked up to the net directly, without the need for a headset and interface? He wasn’t sure he liked that thought. There was a reason no one plugged an outernet feed right into their head—actually about a thousand reasons, but viruses that could fry your brain started and ended the list. The thought of taking that kind of chance—and what it would imply about the stuff inside her head—was enough to spook even his kind.
It would sure as hell explain why someone was after her, though.
“I can get you money,” he told her. And then, with a smile, “I can probably get you your own money.” Okay, so he liked to brag. What hacker didn’t have an ego? “The question is, what’s going to happen after that? If you’ve got someone on your tail who’s good enough to track you like this, it’s only a question of time before he catches up with you again.” He met those blue eyes, and held them. “I could maybe help you....” He let the suggestion trail off into whatever she might wish to add to it.