This Alien Shore (51 page)

It was no choice at all, really.

He locked himself in his room, a small but well-appointed chamber on the main level of the station. As he shut the door, his wellseeker gently informed him that his hands were trembling. As if that were news.

For a while he just stood there, staring at the empty space before him. Then, methodically, deliberately, he sat down in front of the desk and looked up at the tiny node in the comer of the ceiling which would carry his signal to the galaxy at large. Such an unobtrusive thing, really. Hard to believe such a simple mechanism could give access to such an awesome creation.

He'd taken off his headset on the way from the lab, a planetborn habit; now he raised it up again and fitted it onto his head, over the contacts embedded in his skull. He felt a faint buzz as the magnetic clips took hold, fixing it in place so that it wouldn't move while he worked. He imagined he felt the subtle heat of the contacts coming online, but of course that was nonsense; the brain had no internal sense organs. He pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes, where the metal band had disarrayed it.

Then: no more steps left. No more avoidance possible.
Do it now, or do it never.

Shutting his eyes, he envisioned the icon that would prepare his brain for interface. He imagined he could hear a faint hum in the headset's wiring as it began to process the signals necessary to log him onto the outemet for the first time. He found his palms were sweating, and wiped them off on the sides of his shirt. There was nothing to be afraid of, really. It was just a larger version of the system that every civilized planet used, which he worked with every day. So what if it had the history and idiosyncrasies of a thousand alien cultures jacked into it. So what if it was peppered with full-second delays, where a signal had to be skipped off the ainniq to a neighboring node ... or even full-minute delays, if several such skips had to be made. So what if its signals crossed open space, to be intercepted by data pirates, altered by them, precious data corrupted in transit or simply stolen, the ultimate coin of the realm for this technological age. So what if the result of all that made for a system so dynamic and unpredictable that it might as well be alive, and therefore must be
courted rather than controlled.
He knew how it worked. He had written the book on it. The galaxy looked to him for guidance in how to understand this thing.

ONLINE, the headset informed him.

Trembling only slightly, he eased his way into the system. Gateway icons appeared one after the other, Guild-signs that had to be neutralized before he could contact the outernet directly. He gave them the codes they needed. The system tried to tie him into some virtual control system, which would allow him to visualize his options as doorways and his progress as physical movement, but he shut that down as soon as it started up. Such tricks were for those whose minds couldn't deal with pure code, not for him.

At last the outernet icon filled his field of vision, confirming his connection. He drew in a deep breath, scanned his collection of real-time investigative programs to make sure they were all ready to go, and requested a link to Aires Station.

There was a disconcerting pause, seconds in length, that made his heart lurch in his chest.
It's nothing. Just the skip. Ignore it.
You could hardly expect to make contact with a station halfway across the galaxy in the same time that you could send something across a planet. Nevertheless, that time was enough for his fearful imagination to go to work, and at last he ordered his wellseeker to release a few drops of sedative into his bloodstream, just to rein in his pounding heart.
Try not to think about what's out there.
The pressure in his chest eased a tiny bit as the Aires gateway icon took form before him.
It's just a vast network, that connects to systems all over the galaxy. No different in theory than the one back home, on which you do your research.

But that wasn't true, and he knew it. That one was a quiet and underused library, the other a madhouse of human activity. On Guera one might search for a given resource, find it, and withdraw; in the outerworlds one was likely to be jostled by a thousand competing programs, swept away by sheer mass of data searches, drowned in games and advertisements and semilegal entertainments, and in general disconcerted until research was all but impossible. Most people could use enhanced interface programs to wend their way through the madness, but that didn't help when you had to study the code itself. Or when you preferred code, as he did.

He brushed aside two offers of a virtual menu for Aires points of interest, a display of popular station wares, and one particularly aggressive advertisement for a new viddie, that followed him around for several annoying minutes before he managed to trick it into going elsewhere. Such things were forbidden on Guera, whose innernet was strictly controlled. They were forbidden on every civilized planet, as far as he knew, as well as on the ships and habitats that circled them. Only here, in the outworlds, had dataspace been made such a free-for-all.

He had a headache from it already.

He found a relatively quiet connection to Northstar's main processor, and slipped inside with the help of a codecracker stored in his headset. Once there, the datastream was somewhat quieter, calmer, and easier to navigate. Of course. No business could afford the kind of distraction that took place on the public wavelengths.

He took the time to get the lay of the land, dodging a few security programs that came sniffing his way. Nothing sophisticated, just your basic virus and intruder detectors. He knew what kinds of code to feed them so that they went away, satisfied he was nothing out of the ordinary. So far so good.

No wonder hackers thrived in the outerworlds. If this was the kind of security that was typical out here, he was surprised the problem wasn't worse. He was used to Guild security, complex megaliths of defensive programming that were updated on a regular basis. These basic sniffers ... they were easy to dodge, and he could even have entrapped one and reprogrammed it to do his will, had that been his need. Oh, they'd keep the system clear of most viruses well enough, and nab a high percentage of intruders as well, particularly those who had no background in net security ... but that wouldn't stop a real hacker. The kind of people who regularly attacked the Guild files could break into this system without pausing for breath.

Which was maybe why they went after the Guild files, he realized. Where was the challenge out here?

Strangely, as he headed toward Reservations, he began running across fragmented files. Oddly fragmented, as if pieces of them had been torn away somehow. He stopped to take a closer look at several, and downloaded copies for study at a later time, but it didn't appear that the damage was in any predictable pattern. Very strange. The programs running in this section seemed injured, too, for they were running much slower than what Masada had seen elsewhere. He caught sight of one that was doing the equivalent of limping in circles, spewing out the same set of garbled data over and over. That was very strange. Had the copies of Lucifer which disappeared in this place somehow damaged Northstar's programming? He'd never seen anything quite like this before.

It was then, for the first time, that he felt his own guidance programs picking up speed. Instinctively he adjusted them. He knew about this phenomenon, of course—the riptides of the outernet were infamous among programmers—and was prepared with a set of programs designed to stabilize his signal. Nevertheless he felt a cold rush of fear, as the full immensity of the creature that enveloped him hit home. His programs settled down a bit, but he found himself nearer to Reservations than he had intended. He tried to back out—

And his signal jammed. Menus opened like flowering buds before him, one after the other, welcoming him into the Reservations center. But he didn't want to go there yet. He flashed up an anchor program and quickly reviewed his code. Nowhere had he given any order which should send him into Reservations. How bizarre. The anchor searched out a string of stable code and locked him onto it; forward motion ceased. The welcome menu for New Reservations flickered in his field of vision, frozen in the instant of its appearance.

What the hell was going on?

He took a long and careful look at the data around him. It should be mostly stable, strings of numbers that had to do with hotel accounting, coordinates for data routing, general bookkeeping. But oddly, some of that seemed to be edging toward the gateway to Reservations as well. There was no way to tell in the midst of all this just what was causing it, but he copied a few samples quickly, for study later. It was possible this was just some quirk of outernet behavior that the locals were used to, but he found it totally alien. He took a look around for data coming out of Reservations, to see if that was progressing as it should.

There wasn't any.

None at all.

With a thrill he realized that he was not balanced at the edge of some normal anomaly, but something deliberately crafted, and probably not by Northstar. No doubt this was what had trapped his virus, as it was now entrapping every other program that wandered too close. A dead zone, into which data entered, from which it could not emerge.

He had used such zones in his own research, though they had been on university machines, far away from vital consumer systems. He was willing to bet whoever had done it on this machine didn't belong here.

On the one hand the thought was discouraging, for it meant that the disappearance of his virus might have been pure coincidence, unrelated to the purpose of this illicit construction. On the other hand he was curious now, and since the odds were at least two to one that the perpetrator was a hacker of some kind, he sent out a program that he knew would draw response from that type.

A short program, that he simply released. Sure enough, the tides of shifting data caught it up and moved it toward the Reservations gateway. Soon after it passed through it was swallowed by the dead zone, and Masada could no longer track it.

One second. Two.

Three seconds.

He would have no way of knowing when his message would make contact. It contained only one word, which would overcome all other images for less than a second.
Hello.
Just that. The word was simple, but it implied a host of other messages.
I'm out here. I'm watching you. I know what you're doing. Want to know who I am?

If that was a hacker inside the dead zone, he was willing to bet he'd come take a look.

Four seconds. Five.

The anchor program indicated that parameters were shifting. The flow of data toward Reservations slowed, then ceased.

Six.

Something probed him, a tentative touch, subtle and quick. Not quick enough. The minute direct contact was made a real-time trace was possible, and he locked onto the signal and began to race toward its source. The time delay from the skip wasn't enough to impede his chase, but it made the effort disorienting; thank God his quarry wasn't on his home station either, so that they were on equal footing.

He followed the signal back through the node, into the skip, and onto another station. Code was strewn across his path like boulders across a road; he managed to work his way around the obstacles without pausing for breath. Another node, another skip, another hailstorm of obstacles. His quarry was trying to lose him with simple speed, and that just wasn't going to work. He followed him into the main processor of a waystation—

And hundreds of paths splayed out before him. Thousands, in fact, each identical, each offering a gateway to somewhere else.

This had been prepared long in advance, no doubt about that. This was the reason his quarry had taken the risk of probing him in the first place: because he knew that the way home was masked by so many forks in the road, no man could hope to follow him.

In the annals of hacking, Masada had just lost the chase. He could no longer follow the signal in real-time; by the time he explored half a dozen of these gateways the hacker would be offline and far from his connection point. No doubt he imagined himself safe already, and was congratulating himself on a neat escape.

Only it wasn't that. Not yet.

With the same meticulous care that Masada had once used to regress Lucifer, he now set up programs that would analyze all those gateways. He was willing to bet that they were designed to impede the flow of data, slowing down any programs that might try to get through during pursuit. All but one, of course; that way would be wide open, the mousehole through which his quarry meant to slip. In time he would know which gateway that was, and his sniffers would search for the hacker's trail on the other side. In time, by virtue of meticulous effort, not speed and ingenuity, those sniffers would work their way to the end of the trail, and discover what system the original signal had been launched from.

He couldn't get the hacker's name this way, nor any other specific information about him. But he could find out what station he worked from, and where on that station he went for outemet access. That was a start.

Setting his sniffers in motion, he retraced his own signal back to Aires Station, to the place where the dead zone had been. It was no longer there. A wealth of trapped data was stranded in Reservations, wounded programs limping home, new input rushing through the troubled area, searching for connection ... and there was his virus. Lucifer-X. It didn't take him long to find it; the virus was motionless, and situated at what would have been the center of the dead zone. He called up its homing sequence just to make sure that this was the spore he had indeed lost, a simple act of confirmation. Or so he thought.