This Alien Shore (19 page)

With a spare headset he downloaded the information he needed, then wiped the headset clean immediately. With data like this, you didn't take chances. He'd put over thirty years into accumulating information on rare and alien encryption techniques, which was why he was one of the highest-paid hackers in existence. Of course, that could only take you so far....

He tried not to think about that, as he set up his remote processor to deal with the new input. He tried really hard not to be impatient ... but it was hard. Talent such as his was destined for bigger and better things, and although he knew his chance would come eventually, it irked him that no opportunity had come yet. Oh, sure, the Guildmistress lavished gifts upon him for his many services to her, and his coworkers all regarded him with something midway between admiration and awe. He could taste it while he worked with them, and he played up to it whenever he could.

“Well, what have we here?” he would mutter, as he entered the encryption office, “Another capsule from Danylon?” And his coworkers would look at him in stunned amazement, wondering how he needed no more than a glance to assess the chaos of foreign symbols which they had struggled with for hours. He loved that moment. He loved it even more because it was all showmanship, nothing more. Long ago he had wormed his secretive way into his Mistress' own private datalines, and could pluck a single fact from them so delicately that her security alarms never stirred. Of course, that was in part because he himself had designed her whole security system....

Yes, he was living in a hacker's paradise, no doubt about it. Paid an immense wage to rape the galaxy of its most secret data, and festooned with Guild status for it. It should have been enough. It would have surely been, for any other code hack. But it wasn't.

He wanted the station.

She was only two ranks above him, in the hierarchy of Guild service. And he knew that you could skip a step or two if the Guild Prima wanted you badly enough. No man of his profession had ever gained a guildmastership, but that didn't mean it couldn't be done. For a man who had broken the war code of Termillian and hijacked pirates' freight on Paradise, let's face it, there were few challenges left.

Ironically, the one thing that could vault him into the higher reaches of Guild power was the same thing his Mistress had hired him to find. Data. He didn't know what he was looking for exactly, or how it would work, but he knew it was out there, his golden goose. Data that would threaten to topple the Guild—or strengthen it—so that the Prima must have it, or all would suffer. There would be rewards aplenty for the one who brought her that little tidbit, and Delhi was perfectly positioned to do so. And he was perfectly positioned to steal it from her when it came in.

“What do you want for this?” the Prima would ask in her dulcet tones, to which he would casually respond, “Well, my talents seem wasted where I am, perhaps I should move up to a higher level....” And if she talked about raising him one level in rank, he would politely point out that one who had saved the Guild itself surely deserved better, perhaps—dare he suggest?—a station of his own....

And it had to be Delhi's, of course. If he didn't take that woman down, and take her down hard, she would make him pay for such a betrayal. But if she lost her own status at the same time that he gained his, so the facilities of the Guild were no longer hers to command ... it would be hard for him to manage, but it could be done. It had to be done. Her network was too vast, too perfectly managed, for him to play rival to it. It must be neutralized, if he was to come into his own.

After all,
he thought to her,
we play the same game, you and I. And there can only be one who writes the rules.

But first, he must have the data.

With a second glance to make sure the headset had really,
really
been wiped clean—he was compulsive about such things, which was part of the reason for his success—he started to scan the mysterious data packet one more time. So many instructions had been added to his decryption program now that its action was noticeably slower, and he tapped his stylus on the console restlessly as he waited it out. If he'd been on the big machines this wouldn't be happening, but you didn't work on hijacked data with any machine you valued. Just last week the safeguards on a Paradise packet had fried five remote units, one after the other. You didn't take a chance on that happening to something important.

A red light flashed on his screen, alerting him to a change in activity. Bingo. He leaned forward and studied the data that was now scrolling up for his perusal. And he grinned. Yeah, that was an Earth code all right, and a damned old one. No one but a collector would still have something like that on file ... shit, either someone was playing a very complicated joke, or the data was damned serious stuff. He could feel his pulse begin to race as he started to neutralize the security safeguards built into the packet. They weren't focused on the whole package, he realized, but on one very small section, barely a few lines long.

As he got near it, one of his alarms went off, and he quickly backed away and took a second look. The packet looked unchanged. He reran the last part of the search program to check for contamination ... and damn if something hadn't gotten into his own equipment. Shit.

He'd been through too much to get this far, didn't want to go grabbing a clean disk and starting over. Besides, whatever had zapped his first set of programs might just do it to the next copy. That meant he had to weed out whatever he had picked up. He called up a comparison program to go through the software byte by byte, comparing key sections of code to a copy of the original. The console buzzed softly each time it zapped a piece of intruding code. He was too preoccupied to hear it.

What the hell was this? Why was there a security program being triggered in the
middle
of the goddamned packet? It should have been there from the beginning, to protect the whole transmission. What sense did it make to protect this one small bit of code separately, as if it had come from some other source—

He stared at the screen. His heart stopped beating for a second. He didn't notice.

A different source.

Jesus Christ ...

His decryption program had stopped.
Layered encryption,
it warned him.
Proceed?

His hands trembled slightly as he typed in,
No. Isolate segment. Display.

And he waited.

The machine whirred softly, an unusual sound. He was driving it hard, that was certain. After a while a series of lines appeared on the screen. They were, of course, unreadable. He set the encryption program on them, and got another five lines. Still unreadable.

His heart was pounding now. He felt as if he should look up and see if anyone else noted his uncharacteristic excitement, but he couldn't take his eyes off the screen. Trembling, he gave it instructions for a new decryption scan, and when the computer indicated that yes, it could crack this code as well, he felt something in his gut tighten up in anticipation.

This was it, he thought. This had to be the one.

At last the computer signaled its success. The five lines of alien text disappeared from the screen. Five other lines took their place.

English.

There was more, but that was supporting data. He didn't look at it yet. He didn't look at anything but those five lines.

He managed to touch the control that would bring the screen down to darkness. This was no time to discover that someone was reading over his shoulder.

Jesus Christ.

At last he brought the contrast back up and typed,

JAMISIA SHIDO. SEARCH.

It did so. Four minutes. Four very long, very tense minutes. THREE, it said at last.

The small number wasn't surprising. Corporate names were tightly controlled, it was rare that people would share both given name and corporate. PLANET/STATION OF ORIGIN? he typed. Hands still shaking.

The response this time was immediate.

Earth. Reijik Station was one of the nodes that served Earth; if one wanted to intercept a woman fleeing from the motherworld's sphere of influence, Reijik Station was one of the very few places one would have to warn.

That had to be the one.

Stivan had the computer give him all the information it had on that Jamisia Shido. There wasn't much. Earth files were generally private things, not uploaded to the vast outernet system. But it seemed that with this woman there was even less than usual.

Little wonder, he thought, if she was involved in some secret project. Little wonder if that project involved outpilots....

He pressed forward, feeding icon after icon to the controlling programs. Cut the data packet open, pluck out the twice-encoded section. Close the data packet up again, working with code as fine as a surgeon's scalpel to make it appear truly whole, as if nothing had ever been removed.
Be careful,
he told the stranger's hands before him,
be very careful, Delhi knows what she is doing. Leave nothing for her to find.

When at last he was done, he set the encryption program to running again. Later he would go into his log and remove all traces of the operation, so that no one could ever discover what he had done. As far as anyone was concerned, he had devoted this hour to decoding a packet for the Guildmistress' use.

The small chip on which the message was recorded burned in his hand as he picked up a clean headset, trying to bring his brainware up at the same time. This time there was no doing it naturally; he used the headset to take control of his wellseeker, and injected enough sedative into his bloodstream that at last he was capable of feeding it the start-up icon again. Clearly the biological safeguard he had been so proud of was not a good thing to have around at moments like this.

He loaded the transmission's contents into his headset, and from there into his brainware's permanent storage. Five lines and a short packet of supporting data. Shadows of a project that was ultra-secret, that involved the outpilots and Earth, that might—just might—be the break he'd been waiting for. Reijik had hijacked it from Earth. Delhi had hijacked it from Reijik. And now he had hijacked it from Delhi....

And that,
he thought darkly,
is the most dangerous part of all.

But well worth it. God, yes. Well worth it.

“M
istress?”

Delhi turned slowly; her mechanical carapace did not allow for quick movement.

It was Jovanne, her secretary. “I have that log you asked for.”

“Yes, of course.” She waved absently to an empty spot on the table, where she might set it down. “Leave it here, I'll take a look at it.”

She did not watch as the data chip was laid down on the table, nor as the tall Anduluvian bowed and left. Her mind was on something else.

Her web.

She was perusing its lesser strands now, and it took all her concentration. Not vast concourses of data, these, but delicate lines built of single facts, that rippled like delicate cilia in her mind's eye. Each time a fact was added to her collection she saw it thus; if one was removed, she could sense the gap forming, as a true spider could sense some alteration in his own creation. At times she even lost sight of the fact that it was data she was looking at, and lost herself in the sheer beauty of it all: fractal patterns of interlocking facts, complex beyond all imagining. The outernet that most people saw was barely a reflection of this ultimate truth, a pale and clouded image in a distorted mirror. How many could see the world as she did? How many understood that the reinterpretation of a single datum could cause shivers to vibrate through the entire web, until the vast supporting strands themselves were threatened? She knew, and she could see the changes directly, without the need for intellectual interpretation. That was the gift which the Hausman Effect had given her, when it robbed her of her mobility.

She was more than content with the trade.

With care and delicacy she focused in her analytic programs on the anomaly she had sensed. There were over five thousand programs embedded in her headset which were running constantly, requesting and receiving data from her inhouse system, analyzing it, requesting data from the outernet, scouring it clean for safety, sorting the two sets together and searching for patterns ... it was partly her own programming, partly that of a lover (now dead), and a security chief (now dead), and a favored hacker (still alive, but without any memory of his work). Only the end results of the data search were fed into her brainware, where her specialized senses devoured them and displayed them in this, her chosen metaphor. Through it, she had learned to spot data trails so fine, so hidden, that her own hackers had passed them by. With it, she had leveraged herself to the Mastership of this station. Using it, she would defend her seat to the death.