This Alien Shore (20 page)

Not her death, of course.

The web resolved in her mind's eye, sparkling with activity not unlike the brain's own. After a time she could see the fine strand divide, and identify which part she needed.
It's on the station, she mused, how interesting.
Then, a few seconds later, new patterns resolved.
In my citadel. Even more interesting.
Her expression was dark as she studied the web further, looking for the anomaly's source. It was subtle indeed, this thing which her search programs had found, well beneath the level of data with which she usually concerned herself. Perhaps it would have no value at all. But she reminded herself of the first tenet of chaos theory—infinitesmally small input can alter infinitely large systems—and continued her search, wondering what it was that her brain and its attendant programs had found worthy of notice.

At last she was at the trail's end, and to her amazement found herself amidst the biologs of her employees. She glanced over the tables presented to her, but there was nothing unusual that she saw. She refined her vision further, using the search program for a guide, and found herself reading the biolog of one of her code hacks, a Stivan Dici. Like the others, he had no idea that she regularly tapped into his wellseeker's readings. Oh, he could figure it out if he wanted to; he had the skill to spot such a thing ... if he looked for it. No one did. Who would think that one's employer kept an hourly watch on one's blood pressure, one's pulse rate, one's breathing?

And there it was, in just those terms. A spike the day before, and two at night. A long, tense plateau during REM sleep. And a series of spikes today, closer and higher and more significant than any which came before.

He had found something, she guessed. Or heard something. Or thought of something. A piece of data that excited or upset him, that tormented his dreams, and that today—right now—received his full attention. His pulse rate was well out of bounds for a man of his age and condition; she checked it against his medical files and whistled softly.
Well
out of bounds. He had always been something of a hothead, and spikes in his biolog were far from rare, but the intensity of these, and their sustained nature, hinted at some outside cause. And given his nature, she would have put money on it being some some choice piece of data that had come into his hands.

She called up the work he had been doing when the first spike hit, and found herself reading the Reijik packet. He had decrypted most of it, but it still made little sense, being mostly specifics of shipping and communication between Earth conglomerates and their Reijik counterparts. A rich harvest, to be sure, and one that her analysts would comb through for useful data ... but there was nothing she saw that should excite the kind of agitation Dici's biolog had recorded. Delhi's hackers dealt with this kind of data all the time.

LOCATE STIVAN DICI, she instructed her headset. It took little more than a second for the request to be transmitted to the inhouse computer, which responded, PRIVATE QUARTERS. She asked, ACTIVITY? Another second passed, then the words flashed before her eyes: DATA SEARCH/ OUTERNET.

That wasn't like him. Usually her prime hack lived in his lab, where paper-thin monitors adorned the walls, and cabinets full of sterile equipment attended his most dangerous exploits. This wasn't like him at all, this ... secrecy.

No, this
attempt
at secrecy.

Like so many who did not truly know her inner workings, Dici had underestimated her. She had the computer switch on the cams hidden in his quarters, and put their gleanings on screen. There she saw him sitting on his bed, with beads of sweat running down his face. Most uncharacteristic. His hand lay on a keyboard of some kind, marked in symbols she didn't recognize; most likely a personal code of icons he had developed himself. She brought a cam into close range and began to record the symbols themselves, and the dance of his fingers across them. There was knowledge here, and she wanted it, but the only way to eavesdrop on such an encoded soliloquy was to obtain its template directly from the man's brain. And while that was not impossible, its cost was considerable. One could not remove information from a dead brain, for the brainware systems expired upon death; one could not force it from a fully functioning brain, for a man like that would have safeguards in place that would erase sensitive data at the first hint of invasion. No, there was a way to get what she wanted ... but only once. She had to make sure that she wanted it enough to sacrifice this servant, and then strike with stealth and surety.

She was receiving a feed from her house computer now, listing all the data requests that this man had made. She watched as he continued what was clearly some kind of private investigation, citing corporate names that were among the elite of Earth's power brokers. Something very big was clearly at stake here, and if her guess was right, the first hint of it had been discovered in the Reijik data packet. She called up the packet in her own head and compared it to a list of his search items. No match. So whatever it was that had inspired his investigation, had been removed from the packet before she saw it. And that—by the standards of her house—was a crime.

You have betrayed me,
she mused coldly. If so, then there was nothing left worth saving, was there? Other than the data itself, which was lodged within his brain. It was commonly said that you couldn't get to such information without the subject's cooperation. That the brain invariably protected itself too well for such invasion.

How unfortunate that would be, if it were true.

S
tivan visualized the search icon, and spelled out in his mind's eye: JANET.

He scanned the twenty-odd definitions with a careful eye. Any of them might have been right. None of them felt right. At last he sighed, and signaled for the house computer to SEARCH: UAO

SEARCH/EARTHBIO, he directed it. JAMISIA SHIDO

Not by everyone,
he thought darkly.

After a moment he visualized, TRIDAC ENTERPRISES. A flurry of bright words scrolled into his field of vision.

No, this would get him nowhere; the file on a company that vast would take hours to study, and the information he wanted, if it was there at all, would probably be so buried beneath paragraphs of businesspeak he'd pass it right by.

Frustrated, he stared into space. After a minute his attention saver kicked in and started to display enticing holos of nude women, as a reminder that he was still online. He banished them with an irritated snort and tried to think.

Janet. A name. The project had been named for someone. Maybe not in the corporation that had started the project. Maybe this was a code term used by those who were trying to get control of it.

JANET TRIDAC, he visualized, interrupting its scrolling of financial statistics. HOW MANY EXIST?

It took the computer a good five seconds to go through all its databanks for that information. It could have taken as long as five minutes, if the data hadn't been stored on Delhi's station.

15
, it told him.

PLANET/STATION OF ORIGIN?

Two from Earth. He called up their bios and studied them. Janet Austria Tridac was a research technician in Tridac's main lab, on Earth's surface. Janet Dian Tridac was a maintenance worker in the company's orbiting habitat. The one he wanted was unlikely to be the second one, he thought, why would they name such a vital project after her ... but at this point he was not about to rule anything out. There was only a slim chance the project had been named after someone currently working for Tridac; Earth corporations didn't like to give that kind of recognition to a single worker, lest it inflate their own sense of importance. A worker who knew his own worth was a risk to security, the old axiom stated. Stivan called up all the data he could find on past Janet Tridacs—there were nearly thirty in the databanks, and probably more had existed on Earth whose files had never been outloaded to the nodes—and studied it all. There wasn't much. The corporate giants of Earth were notoriously secretive, and this one was no exception; the bios were short, superficial, and utterly unhelpful. He did the same historical search for Janet Shido, and again came up with nothing. Or perhaps the answer was there in front of his face, and he just wasn't seeing it. Damn.

He stared at the five lines again, tasting their mystery with a dry tongue as he licked his lips. This wasn't his forte. He was good at finding data, brilliant at decoding it, but when it came down to
using
the foreign bits and pieces that came his way, he had always been blissfully ignorant. It wasn't his job.

Now it was.

His security program flashed him a warning, alerting him to the fact that he had been online for an hour already. He had programmed it years ago to warn him of that, when he first realized that someday he might wind up doing research he didn't want Delhi to know about. An hour of research was high risk, in this situation; the house computer would have logged it, and anyone going over the records would surely wonder what a hack was doing in a data search for so long. He'd better erase his tracks, and fast. He visualized one of the icons that would give him access to the security programs Delhi relied upon——and a flash of pain seared through his brain. No, not pain exactly. Disorientation, so sudden and so powerful that for a moment it felt as if his brain had been put through a blender. The sensation was sickening, and though it didn't hurt in a physical sense, his inner senses reeled in agony. What the hell was going on? He tried to—

Tried to—

Tried to—

Didn't try.

Didn't do.

Anything.

Silence, within and without. Where thoughts normally scurried through his head, there was nothing. The sound of his pulse, now beating wildly, resounded in his ears. BLOOD PRESSURE/PULSE RED ZONE, his wellseeker informed him. CORRECT? He could give it no answer. After a moment the system defaulted to a health option, and he knew that instructions were being given to his heart, his brain, his adrenal gland. Seconds passed. The pounding slowed to a mere fevered thud. The pressure in his head seemed to ease a bit.

He couldn't think.

He couldn't think!

Emotions poured into him without analysis, without explanation. Primitive emotions, such as the lowliest life-forms must know, bereft of any rational trappings. Terror as raw as an animal knows when the scent of a hunter suddenly comes from behind it. Desperation such as would cause a trapped beast to gnaw off its own foot, in an effort to escape a trap. The emotions filled him to bursting, till tears came out of his eyes. But there was no thought accompanying them. No brain activity at all, that anyone would label
human.
He couldn't even wonder what had happened to him ... for that in itself was a thought, and thought—all thought—was denied him.

After a brief time, an endless interlude of terror, he heard the door open behind him. He didn't turn around to see who it was—didn't even
want
to turn around, for
wanting
was a complex thought process—but fear stoked his blood pressure to new heights. CORRECTING, his wellseeker repeated. Whomever it was that had come in remained where he was for a moment, then began to move toward him. And it was with the terror of a trapped and dying animal that he recognized the almost inaudible hiss of Delhi's mechanical carapace.

After what seemed like an eternity she moved into his field of vision. Her expression was unreadable.

“Well, well. Stivan Dici. My most loyal servant.” Her clear eyes fixed on him, icy in their depths; in the folds of her aged and mechanically supported flesh they seemed to almost take on a life of their own, and he cringed beneath their scrutiny. “Perhaps I should tell you a story, Stivan. Not that you'll be able to appreciate all its fine points, of course. Your mind is quite frozen in the here-and-now, and hardly in a state for speculation. But I think the points that matter most will be clear.”