This Alien Shore (53 page)

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

He waved the secretary out with a short gesture. Che was a good man, he'd find the data if it was there. And of course Kent had his spies in the League, who could help him when it came time for a real investigation. He had spies everywhere that it mattered, even in Delhi's own household. How else did you keep control of your enemies, and make sure that friends were what they claimed to be?

With a sigh he called up the League's data once more, and began to scrutinize it closely.

C
hezare Arbela walked quickly through the Guildmaster's house, flashing orders as he went. Instructions went out to Kent's programmers, to his analysts, to the people who designed and maintained his spy-eyes, everyone. They all had their part to play in this, and Arbela's job was to orchestrate the overall effort so that each part was not only perfect, but perfectly intermeshed with all others.

He would do that, of course. It was his job. It was what he excelled at, and the reason Kent had hired him.

SEND ME A COURIER, he instructed.

How the Guildmaster must value Arbela, who had served him faithfully for so many years. How content Kent must be to know that he had such a capable and intelligent man to rely upon, one who could serve as a true extension of his will in all things.

The courier met him in his outer office. He looked like a mere boy, whose bland countenance seemed devoid of any profound emotion. The age was the result of surgical art, of course, and the expression a sign of his professional competence. Live couriers had no value if they stood out from the crowd. This one would go unnoticed, he was willing to bet, even by Delhi's hawk-eyed crew.

Arbela took out of his pocket a chip he'd had ready for weeks, and watched while the boy uploaded it into his brainware. Data pirates might intercept the transmissions from a station, but they were hard pressed to pick out which traveler among millions had a vital letter tucked in between his brain cells. A simple enough program allowed the courier to store his message without giving him access to it, so that he might carry it in safety. And even if the message were hijacked somehow, Arbela knew that no one could break through its encryption, save the one person it was meant for.

He imagined the words as they would appear before that person's eyes, blood red letters against a background as black as space itself.

THE STILL WATERS STIR. ACTION IS REQUIRED.

“Go,” he commanded. The courier obeyed. Arbela's program would give him further instructions on the way.

Now,
Arbela thought,
the game begins in earnest.

I
T SPOOKED Phoenix, what had happened in Northstar.

It wasn't like he'd never gotten caught before. It was just ... a weird move that guy pulled on him. Too clever to be security, they just didn't think like that. And yet ... a hacker?

Some of his diversionary programs had reported back to him. He had them do that sometimes, just to see who was following him and how far they got. It was risky, since anything coming back to him could be traced, but he had them do it way after the fact, long after security had stopped watching for him. And of course, he'd put in safeguards there, too ... though he wondered now if this guy couldn't get through them. Damn, he'd been fast!

Anyway, he checked those programs out and then just sat back in amazement, not quite believing what he saw. And then he took a chance and actually hacked back into Northstar himself—they'd increased the security since his last visit, so it took nearly five minutes—to see what was left of the gateways he had set up. And to check who'd tried to go through them.

Every one had been tested. Every single one.

By the same program.

Now, if you'd told him that twenty or thirty had been breached, he'd have said that he expected it. Most guys would try that many before they realized that sheer numerical odds were against them. If you told Phoenix that some guy had waded through a hundred or so to find the one most likely to lead to him ... well, maybe if he was determined enough he might, though most guys just gave up when they realized they could no longer catch him in realtime.
But every single one?
Statistically speaking, that meant that once his pursuer had figured out which way Phoenix had gone, he hadn't come right after him, but had inspected all the other gateways first. What a bizarre move. What kind of security worked like that, long after they knew the trail was cold?

Unless he wasn't smart enough to figure out which way Phoenix had gone.

So that made him nervous. Enough that he beefed up his own in-house security and sent out a few sniffers looking for the guy's equipment signature. He'd picked that up from one of the gateways—a refinement he'd only added recently—and it was hard to say how he felt when he saw the results. Pleased, that he'd gotten away from someone using an experimental Sonroya prototype? Or doubly spooked, that someone with access to state-of-the-art equipment was so obviously interested in him?

All right, so the sniffers would look for this guy. In the meantime, it really bothered Phoenix that he'd had to leave a copy of the virus behind. He hadn't dared go right back to search for it, for fear his pursuer was watching for such a move, but he'd come back a day later to scoop it up. No luck. It was gone from the cyber horizon, and all his cursing about the hours he'd put into making sure it couldn't wander off on its own was wasted. He, Phoenix, key man in one of the sleekest hacking cadres in outspace, had loosed another copy of the damned thing into the outernet. If his fellow moddies found out about that, they'd have him flayed alive and brain-fried. And he wouldn't try to argue them out of it.

“Hello?”

The unexpected noise broke his concentration, and the code which had been hanging in midair disappeared in favor of a shimmering hourglass. That wasn't like Chaos, to say something to him while he was so clearly working. He turned to the source of the voice ... and then realized it wasn't Chaos. Of course not. Chaos was dead, fried by the same virus he had just let loose. This was someone else.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bother you.”

It was the girl from Nuke's.

How
soft
she seemed, compared to yesterday. All of her self-assurance must have slipped away while she was sleeping. He pulled out a chair for her and pushed it over. She was wearing a shirt he'd given her the night before, a big knit thing from Chaos' stuff. Only he realized now that it hadn't belonged to Chaos, really, but was one of his own that she'd commandeered months ago. On this girl it was really oversized, and those hesitant blue eyes combined with the loose folds of somebody else's shirt made her look just too waiflike for words.

In a strange way that was even more attractive than how she'd looked the day before. He found he had to clear his throat before saying anything. “Um, you want some breakfast?”

She looked around dubiously at the cluttered apartment, where the containers of at least five previous breakfasts were still to be seen. Her spiky hair had flattened down overnight, he noticed, and now you could see just how bad the cut was. Unless some planet thought that ragged mess was fashionable. Jesus, it looked like someone had just taken scissors and lopped it all off.

Well, on a station like Hellsgate no one cared, but on Paradise people were fashionable enough that mistakes tended to get noticed. And he was willing to bet that the last thing she wanted to be, was noticed. He'd have to get her to a real stylist soon, or at least someone who could fake it better than that.

Speaking of which. The sniffers should be back soon.

She wrapped her arms around herself in a hesitant, vulnerable kind of way that shouldn't have gotten to him, but it did. “Yeah. That would be nice.” There was hunger in her voice, pretty obvious once he listened for it. Strange that she hadn't asked for anything before ... or maybe not so strange, if she didn't want to stress this unexpected hospitality which had come to her out of nowhere.

“What would you like?”

A hesitation. “What do you have?”

He got up from where he was working and maneuvered through the narrow path that wound between equipment benches, to where the keeper was. Opening it, he read off the labels of ingredients to her, shelf by shelf. Most of it was juice and fizz and stuff, but there were actually a few things that might have nutrients in them. Mostly stuff that Chaos had left behind. He read those labels off slowly, hoping she'd catch the hint. She looked like she needed some real food in her.

She chose a package of faux eggs and he decided to try the same. Thirty seconds to nuke them while he searched for clean plates. Usually he just ate stuff out of the packages, but this was different; she was
company.
In the end he could only find one plate that didn't have something old and dry stuck to it, so he put his in the cleaner and gave it a few seconds to vibrate the hardened crap off. That and the eggs finished up about the same time. He served them with a flourish, then chilled her a box of juice while she settled down into Chaos' old chair to eat.

God, she was pretty. More now than before. That had been a kind of obvious sex thing that went straight to your groin, circumventing the brain. This, this waif look, plucked at your heart strings. You wanted to help her, protect her, and feed her lots of nourishing things until the hollows under her eyes filled in and the color was back in her cheeks. He found himself almost blushing again, and turned quickly back to his work. A couple of sniffers had reported in, he saw, but he didn't want to go online long enough to see what they'd picked up. That would be rude with company in the house.

Like that would ever have bothered him before. Jesus.

He picked at his own faux eggs in silence as she ate hers with considerably more gusto. When she was done, he offered her more. She hesitated, and it took no expert to read that she was trying to balance her obvious hunger against a desire not to impose too heavily on his hospitality ... so he just went ahead and cooked them up and gave them to her. These were chocolate chip. She looked at them pretty strangely, but ate them all the same. The way she handled her fork implied she had come from somewhere where pretty table manners mattered. For a moment he felt embarrassed about the cluttered state of his abode ... then thought, fuck
it, she's a fugitive and I gave her safe haven, so she'd better have no problem with this.

“So, like, Jamisia.” He coughed a couple of times to loosen up the words that were catching in his throat. “I take it you've got a problem here that goes beyond money.”

The blue eyes fixed on him, round and wide and ... what? Not quite scared. There was something else in those depths that wasn't just a lost waif, but someone very carefully dissecting his every word for hidden meaning. Spooky. Of course, she'd noticed his use of her real first name; he'd gotten that off the finance chip the other day. He'd thrown it at her to see her reaction, but she didn't seem surprised. It was almost as if the name she was called was irrelevant to her.

“Maybe,” she said softly.

“The security bug on your accounts yesterday, that wasn't just looking for you, it was looking for anyone wanting information on you.” He paused, drinking in those blue eyes for a moment. “Now, if this is drug stuff, or something else really black market, I'll be happy to feed you and get you on your feet, but then you've got to go.”