Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1) (26 page)

"Sounds real quality," Sandy suggested dryly, nodding at the frontage as they passed.

"Oh no," Ari said unconcerned, "they're not too bad. Everyone here's registered, licensed and legal. They're just low-class establishments for people who can't afford better. You wouldn't catch a professional there, legal or otherwise."

"Where do the pros go?"

"Well, of course, legal pros get it paid for by their employer ... in my case, now, the CSA. That's a full hospital job ... though, of course, if you're rich enough you can afford that too, so long as it's legal. Of course, CSA has access to a whole range of stuff that's not available to the general public."

She knew that well enough, Vanessa had capabilities that would have gotten a public citizen arrested. But she also knew that not all public citizens abided by those restrictions. She had no doubt that the man walking beside her had numbered among them, before his CSA days. Maybe that was part of the attraction of joining? For his comrade Kazuma, in particular, she could well guess.

"And where do the illegals go?" she asked him.

"I'll show you."

He led her into a nondescript corridor off the main mall between two Chinese restaurants, and past a few small shops beyond. The corridor turned left at a decorated Chinese-style gateway, and an even more nondescript flight of stairs headed underground on the right. Ari led her down with the confident stride of someone who knew precisely where he was going, dark boots rattling a quick descent. A passageway opened to the right of the stairs, past the stairway's faded wooden railings. Sandy stared about in astonishment as they reached the passage and kept walking.

The passageway was gloomy, the lighting a poor industrial fluorescent, shadowy in patches. The floor was a worn and untended ferrocrete, the walls little more than the ferrocrete base of the buildings above. Torn posters adorned the walls, new plastered over old, pictures advertising what might have been music, parties or other gatherings ... it was hard to tell, the writing was mostly a combination of Chinese characters, Hindi, and something that she vaguely recognised as stylised Sanskrit. Her memory implants allowed her to read just about any language ever written, although slowly, but this stylised, jargondense, colloquial stuff was difficult. There were no doors along the immediate stretch ahead, just posters, the occasional graffiti and some exposed plumbing that looked suspiciously ferry-rigged through rough holes drilled in the ceiling and floor.

"Wow," she said, keeping a brisk pace at Ari's shoulder, "this is the first genuine dump I've seen since I've been in Tanusha."

"You haven't seen anything yet, this is just the first level." Ari's long strides ate up the distance quickly-GI or not, her shorter legs had to hurry to keep up. "The planners weren't as omnipotent as they like to pretend. There were lots of sites like this underground, intended for storage, parking, underground manufacturing, whatever. As the city grew it became apparent that some of them weren't viable for their original designation. No one wanted them, the official real estate agencies wouldn't touch them with bio-sanitation gloves. They got bought up and renovated by whatever groups could find a use for them. And being underground, they're not made accountable to the style and culture police."

"What's wrong with the style regulations?" Shifting to local network scan, and finding an immediate, god-awful mass of heavily shielded local systems. "They certainly keep the city beautiful."

"They're mandatory," Ari said with emphatic humour. "Can't have it, you see. Some people don't like anything mandatory."

Sandy gave him a sideways glance. "Friends of yours?"

Ari shrugged. "Maybe. On my bad days." And he reached into his right pants pocket, withdrew the pistol Sandy had spotted long before, and handed it to her. She took it wordlessly, withdrew it briefly from the tight holder, and gave it the usual once-over. Once finished she tucked the holder into a thigh pocket, checked the safety a final time and pushed the pistol into her shoulder holster beneath the jacket.

The passageway ended at an open doorway to the right, blocked only by a curtain of dangling beads. Ari brushed through it first, Sandy following to find herself on a walkway a level above the broad, open floor of what looked like a restaurant. More decorative than she'd have guessed from the passageway. Suspended lights and decorations along the ceiling above a floor filled with tables. A large, open bar along the far side, the wall behind stacked with a profusion of drinks.

A stairway led down to the floor. Sandy eyed the lights and holography rigging along the ceiling corners, rotating reflective panels ... the place would come alive at nights. Now it was empty and echoing, table surfaces bare but for standing menus and glasses. A man polished glasses and arranged drinks behind the bar, and a robot server stalked on backward, bird-like legs among the tables, polishing and preening.

She kept an eye on the robot as they made the floor. It was not a common sight in Tanusha, most restaurateurs preferring human service to automated. And the rapidly accumulating security map on her uplinks showed her enough non-standard barriers and access points to make her suspicious of all kinds of unsuspected internal setups. Robots of any kind could integrate into that, there was no telling what a few technical wizards could implant into its CPU-integrated soft ware.

"Ari!" called the broad, jovial man behind the bar. "What brings you down here at such an ungodly hour?"

"Hi, Ahmed," said Ari, walking over to lean upon the bar. It was cut into a wave shape, stools along the bends. Sandy remained behind by one of the tables, fully uplinked and watching the long-toed, stalking gait of the server-bot that wound its way among the tables like a tame, headless heron. The aircon whirr was particularly loud ... they were under a tower/retail complex, two levels down, and a reflexive hack into the publicly available building schematics showed her the relevant blueprints. The air venting wasn't even connected to the main system above, it was all separate, as was the powergrid. And, of course, the comnet. Highly inefficient. Unless someone was paranoid enough to want to limit all points of access. Which explained the complicated barrier functions at limited access nodes in the comnet, restricting all unauthorised use.

And there was a certain, unnatural sweet smell in the air that caught her attention ... purifier, from the aircon, self-recycling. She knew that smell very well, from space stations and other self-contained facilities, usually military. And now this limited entry, a single passageway leading down to a restaurant ... manned by a single sentry plus robot while all the others who lived and worked down this way would no doubt be fast asleep from a long night's activity. She was beginning to form an idea of exactly what kind of place this was.

"I'm looking for Arnoud," Ari said to the broad, Arabic man behind the bar, "is he around?"

"Oh, gee, I dunno," said Ahmed with theatrical ignorance. "Lotta people looking for Arnoud lately, you know? Lotta people ... but I could check ..." And got a better look at Sandy as she took slow steps out from behind Ari, keeping the stalking server-bot in view, and getting a better reception of room-mounted scanners. She'd detected four so far, all heavily shielded. "Oh baby! Ari, who's your new partner, huh? My faith in you is restored, my man, much better taste than that other little slanty eyed bitch ..." Leaned forward heavily on the bar, the open top buttons of his shirt revealing copious amounts of black, curly hair across his bulging, muscular chest. Grinning unpleasantly. "Hey, baby! What's your name, honey?"

"You don't want to do that," Ari told him, smiling broadly.

"Why not? She frigid or something?"

"Just trust me. You don't want to do that."

Sandy ignored them, having found a vulnerable gap through one of the remote security nodes that linked the monitors from this room to a central system ... she acquired the signal, probed and received a reply. Reconfigured that coding's barrier elements into her own mutation-basic League-configured military applications, it all ran pretty much automatically through the internal visuals in her head. The mutation confirmed itself complete a micro-second later and she sent it ... the security node accepted it as one of its own coding family, and then she was in, and the local network opened up before her. It wasn't very big, geographically, just this little underground area, one large city block coming within a hundred metres of the river. But it contained ... she did a fast count, and came to 296 separate, self-contained, heavily barricaded networks. A living warren of independent network identities. A hacker haven.

"Arnoud's not in," said Ahmed, continuing to watch Sandy as she strolled, his eyes trailing up and down appreciatively. "He's moved, didn't say where ... guess he wanted a change of scene."

"Okay, that's what he paid you to say," Ari said pleasantly enough. "Why don't you quit screwing me around and tell me before I get angry and hurt you?"

"Ari Ari Ari ..." Ahmed turned to him, much aggrieved, hands wide and imploring. "I do no such thing, I tell you he's gone, that's all he tells anyone, he doesn't exactly advertise, you know?"

"Arnoud," Ari had briefed Sandy in the remainder of their lunch, was a close associate of Sal Va's. He lived down here with his own little tribe of friends, fellow netsters all, amassing considerable fortunes through legal work and paying taxes like any regular citizen ... which provided an effective cover for all his other favourite activities.

"Ahmed," Ari said with measured calm, "if he'd left, I'd have heard. I haven't heard."

"Hey, you know, even you can't keep up with everything, Ari," Ahmed said reasonably.

"Don't bet on it. Now if I just walk in there, I'll trip his security systems and there'll be trouble ... I'll make sure you get blamed for it, Ahmed, believe me. . ."

"They've been branched," Sandy announced the instant her netsearch found it. Ari and Ahmed both stared at her. "Someone's spliced the intranet triggers. I can see it clearly, it's a League format program, doesn't show up real well on Federation systems." Racing along internal visual schematics, a quick scan of relevant corridors and elevator shafts ... "There's at least another four ways into here. I think someone's inside, I can't pin where, that security's a different format entirely."

Ari pulled the pistol from the back of his waistband and levelled it at Ahmed's chest with the cool expression of a man about to pull the trigger with no remorse at all. "I see the League XO-grid barriers you got from the Verdrahn GGs doesn't seem to be working today, Ahmed I just know you can read that stuff when it tries to break in."

"How big's the leak?" Sandy asked, calmly pulling her own weapon, accessing as much from the local grid as she could without causing alarm to any tripwires the intruders would surely have placed alongside the usual security mess. Ahmed stood frozen, eyes wide and previously expressive mouth firmly shut.

"Could be real big," said Ari, "not many people use League infiltration software around here, narrows down the options. Ahmed, talk."

"'Bout what?"

Sandy strode over, grabbed his arm and yanked him flying over the bar counter. He hit the ground with an awkward flail of limbs, face down as Sandy twisted the arm up behind him. Too startled to even yell.

"As you probably just figured," she told him, "I'm a GI. Talk or I'll rip your arm off. Who's in there and what are they after?"

"GGs," Ahmed gasped, recovering from the stunning impact, they want Arnoud, they think he helped Sal Va. Revenge, you know? Not real happy boys, don't like to be screwed around ..."

"Let's go," said Ari, moving out from behind the bar, headed across to the pair of doors in the far restaurant wall ... Sandy saw the leftside doorway move from the corner of her eye, snapped her right arm out and levelled a rapid burst, sending the emerging gunman flying backward, heavy rifle flailing away ... tumbling slowly in the dazed slow motion of abrupt combat reflex. She registered the model. The falling body. The long cloak and jacket. The wild hair. The TS-4 assault sweeper, military grade and hardly befitting even Tanushan mafia. And she guessed what was coming.

"Get down!" she yelled at Ari, whose pistol was only now coming up to meet the falling threat. Sprinted across the table-strewn floor, across the doorways as weapons fire erupted, destruction shredding tables, chairs and walls in a deafening roar as she reached the side wall at full acceleration. Sprang up and ran three paces across the vertical surface, gathered before falling, and leapt full power back across at the doors, firing in mid-air trajectory. Rounds struck the splintering doorway, already shredded from the other side, then she hit the wall in hard collision ten metres from her springboard, then hit the floor.

The man she'd first shot exploded back through the door, apparently unharmed, his weapon swinging down onto her ... She scythed his legs from under him with an explosive twist, grabbed a shoulder in mid-fall to smash his head to the floor-noting the hardened thud of body armour even as she disarmed him-and smacked through the still-swinging doorway. Bludgeoned the big man beyond with the rifle and was amazed when he caught it and swung back with his meaty left ... which she caught, leapt an explosive knee into his midriff, hammered an airborne right foot into the corridor wall for the leverage to smash him into the opposite wall as he doubled over, crunched and rebounded as violently as the physics of a confined space would allow.

The corridor beyond was clear, the doorway she'd just come through was a nuisance, so she kicked it off its hinges in an explosion of wood fragments, broken hinges taking pieces of old wall with them. Spun one-armed back around the corner in time to find Ari already going through the second doorway ... damn. Uplinks raced ahead through surrounding schematics-barrier functions locking down potential threats, isolating access points, colonising transmission nodes ... it triggered counter alarms and traps but she didn't care, an activated trap could not surprise, she hated surprises. She covered Ari's doorway, noting the scene of ruin in the restaurant, Ahmed scrambling terrified back behind the bar for cover, miraculously untouched amid the shattered kindling of chairs and tables, a huge swathe of devastation that included a vicious line of holes through decorations and paintings along the far wall. The server-bot stalked gingerly through the ruin, long-fingered arms reaching to remove bits of wreckage and place them on its body tray for transport, seeking the previous orderliness. Not so smart after all.