Looking glass, p.11
Looking Glass, page 11
There is one thing and one thing only that makes this dump worth stopping at, and its name is InterStellar Link. They are the landline gateway for everything to the east of the Sierras to talk to everything to the west of the Sierras, unless you go around the long way across the Atlantic, Europe, Russia, China, the China Sea, Japan, Hawaii, and the Pacific Ocean. The lag alone going that route is fierce, and the cost severe. It's just as bad going by satellite. Putting birds in orbit and keeping them there is expensive, and the quarter-second surface-orbit-surface lag times start to add up when you're using multiple birds.
Finding a cab in Reno is an impossibility. They don't exist. There just isn't the market. So I roll out to the street. It doesn't take long before a battered VW van rolls by. I wave him down. “Gas, Grass, or Ass, no one rides for free.” That's what the sticker reads. I already have a handful of two-euro coins ready. Paper currency doesn't carry the weight in either the currency sense or the brass-knuckle sense around here, and alcohol for fueling these antiques is expensive. The driver leans out the driver's side window, his blond dreads hanging down. “Hey baby. Want a ride?”
You know, when I was little they always said I should stay away from people who said that. Instead I hold out the coins. “I'm headed to I-Link's compound. Could I get a hand with my chair, please?” He helps me in, swaying a little as though to some inner beat that I can't hear. Smokes too much pot, probably. I remember people like him in college. As for the car? Some people collect internal-combustion-engine cars, and reminisce about the glory days of the big V8. Me, I've done my time in noisy, stinking, pollution-spewing old cars and vans like this hunk of junk. Not only can I remember being able to buy gasoline, I can remember when people still bothered to call it unleaded. I remember cars like this. I do not miss them. Technology marches on.
1:30 p.m. Saturday.
The InterStellar Link compound looks exactly like the compounds the Montana Militia would like to build if they had the money. Where the Militiamen use barbed wire and fence posts, I-Link has a meter-thick, reinforced-concrete wall topped with razor-wire. Where the Militiamen's guard towers tend to be crude tree houses with guys with rifles, the I-Link towers are on sturdy steel superstructures: probably recycled transmission towers. The boxes on top have a low-slung, armored look to them, and what are almost certainly gun barrels sticking out. The various shacks are pretty much the same as a militia compound, as are the Quonset hut barracks for the people who work here and so forth. Most of the people dress the part, too — camo fatigues seem to be the dress code, and you can't tell the security people from the working drones.
I'm being cleared through security. Getting dressed again. My rear feels a little greasy from the body-cavity part of today's fun. The guards are going over my chair with an explosives scanner, and my OSDeck and my ice are being thoroughly scanned. They're being careful. After yesterday, I don't blame them. It's a sick feeling in your stomach when you know you're vulnerable, and letting someone into your Network Operations Center, or NOC, without being sure — really sure who they are can be suicidal. The finger wave? Hell, some people pay big bucks for that kind of action.
By the time I'm fully dressed, they've finished going through my stuff. My personal security guard is young, intense looking, probably Native American: black hair, high and tight in front, long in back. Eyes hard enough to cut glass. W&S 25 slung over his shoulder. He's watching me as I get dressed. I should be offended, I suppose. Or flattered. I don't bother with either. I can see the very professional disinterest. I wonder how many times he's had to watch this today. He stiffens a little, getting data back on some jack of his own, probably. It must be under his hair. He's probably got a wireless transceiver in it. “Okay, the NOC has cleared you. Here's your visitor badge. Do not lose it. If you're caught in here without it, you're likely to get shot. Anyone asks to see it, you show them. If you do lose your badge, as soon as you notice, get on the ground, face down, arms and legs spread, and wait for security to come get you. Understand?”
“Yeah. I've been here before.”Right.
“Well then, listen up, this is new as of yesterday. We are in lock-down status. No unauthorized transmissions into or out of the NOC. No unauthorized access of any of our systems. And you do not go into the tank rooms for any reason. Got it?”
“Got it.” You don't try and reason with an 18-year-old with a submachine-gun in your face. You say, “Yes, Sir”. You say, “No, Sir.” You reason with the people he's protecting.
2:00 p.m. Saturday.
The I-Link NOC. I'm underground. I'm not even sure how far, but if I had to guess, I'd guess you could drop a nuke on this place and not inconvenience anybody down here. I'm talking to Director Carson Lance. If you did what you're told more, you'd be a director too. Lance is fresh out of the tank, his hair still wet from the shower. He's wearing the tanker's usual clothes. A bathrobe. Underwear for meetings. I feel overdressed. “Hey, Lance.”
“Cath. How long has it been?”
“Well, since Epimetheus folded up … what … eight years ago now? Been since then, I guess. Been out here a couple times, but…” But it was awkward. But I didn't want to bring back a lot of memories from Epimetheus. But I've forgotten how to have real world friends, maybe. Lance looks at me a little strangely, raising an eyebrow.
“Are you okay, Cath?” He gets out of his chair as I sink back into mine.
“Just … woolgathering. I've been doing that a lot since the attack. It … stirred things up.” Well that, and I am planning to lie to an old friend. “How is Diane?” Change the subject. Distract.
He flinches. “I wouldn't know. She moved to Austin a year ago.”
“Shit. I'm sorry, Lance. I really am. She got the crotch monkeys, I assume?”
Lance looks at me, snorts softly and shakes his head, chuckles a bit. “Do you know how long it took to get Christie to stop calling herself that? She thought that was the funniest thing. Her teachers were not amused.”
I shrug a little. “Nice to know I managed to corrupt a four-year-old, I guess.” His smile must be infectious, I'm starting to do it myself.
Lance chuckles ruefully. “Christie's with me. She's quite the hellion, too. She's sixteen this month. Kelly graduated from high school in December. She's starting college in Montreal. She went with her mother.”
“Did you get Christie her shots?”
Lance scowls at me a moment, but nods. “Of course I did.” Despite the topic, he's relaxed a little, talking about his family. Something I knew he would do. People with families want to talk about them. It makes it hard to find things in common with them when you're single, childless, and not interested in breeding. He goes on. “I think it encouraged her, though.”
“Lance, you know as well as I do that when you're sixteen you don't need encouragement. Shots just limit the consequences.” I still get mine. An unplanned pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease can get you fired from OmniMart. It's a sign of poor judgment, they say. It's also cheaper than treating you after the fact. More importantly, shots suppress your period if you're a woman. Technology marches on. Glory hallelujah, does it ever.
Lance steps back a few steps to lean against his desk. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” He grows serious. “So I assume you're here about yesterday's break-in?”
“Yeah, exactly. We had some deaths, like I said.” Time for business. Time for professionalism. Time to lie to Lance.
“Your company's still officially denying that, by the way,” he says. No surprise there. Policy. Been afoul of that once already. Might as well go for broke. Funny you should put it that way. Oh, do hush up.
“Lance, do you have logs of the event?” Lance watches me a moment. If he's like me, he's settling into engineer mode. And probably trying to sort out what I'm up to. I have to be cautious.
He nods. “Partial logs, yes. They don't start the instant we were attacked, but we have a pretty good record of the attack on OmniMart's network.”
“So you don't know where the attacker came from.”
“I'm sorry, no. All I have before the start of the attack is the operator voice log. I've been digging on this Mojo character more, and he looks like our boy. Or looked. Someone snuffed him last night.”
It's my turn to stare at Lance. “What?” But…
Lance chuckles a little. “I keep my ear to the ground, Cath. C'mon, Cath, level with me. You went on another of your little tiger hunts and got the bastard.” His smile fades as he sees my expression.
“Um. No.” I didn't. This guilty twisting of my stomach notwithstanding.
“You mean to tell me you're not here to collect the reward?”
“I'm sorry, Lance. I didn't do it. The timeline's important, though. I need to know when he died. And where was he?”
“Check your news.” Lance looks at me, more than ever trying to figure out what I'm up to. I know the expression. I know the man.
“Authorization to use your local wireless?” I pull my OSDeck out of the pocket on my chair.
Lance rolls his eyes, then reaches down to his desk and picks up a fiber-optic cable and jacks it into his head a moment. “Yeah, go ahead, you're authorized. I can't believe you're still using that thing.” He pulls the plug out of his head.
“It's paid for.”
The OSDeck reaches out to the I-Link office wireless.
So. News — local feed. The death toll in the last twenty-four hours was seventeen, a record low since the end of the war for Reno. Five suicides, one down-on-his-luck cowboy with a shotgun in the mouth, one jail cell hanging — a minor-league criminal rumored to have attracted the affections of his cellmate. Two slashed wrists, or four, depending on how you count them — a teenage lover suicide pact — and one John Doe, Caucasian, twenty-something, white collar guy found stark naked and beaten to death, apparently by his own hand, in an enclosed tub. Time of death looks like 1:00 a.m. Saturday. Other deaths were police raids, sled races gone bad, accidental impalements, murders, even two or three of natural causes, including one of old age. Pretty much the normal for Reno. Four dead at InterStellar Link from unknown causes, probably remote homicide. Incident occurred around 7:00 a.m. Friday. I'm not surprised. The pirate crew at InterStellar Link would have gone after the intruder in a big way when it first touched their network. They're why I'm here. I'd mourn them too, but I'm a little numb right now. I scroll through the news on the OSDeck's screen and read the summaries. “Yeah, and…?”
“The John Doe. His real name is Arthur Rusbridge, from D.C. A friend of mine at Interpol says they're ninety-percent sure that's Mojo's real name. Come on. Level with me, Cath. Are you sure you didn't nail him?”
I shake my head. “I didn't, Lance. The man was alive when I left him. I caught him, and I broke him, but I didn't kill him.”
Lance raises an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“Because he wasn't our guy. I broke him. I conditioned him to tell me the truth. He was the mastermind behind the Fist of God attack, but he was adamant that he had nothing to do with the follow-up attack. And he was already broken when…” Nondisclosure Agreement… Fuck it. Lance and his people are still at risk. They need to know.
“When what?” Lance's face is tight, apprehensive.
“When whoever it was hit our night shift. We lost the whole shift this time. While I was fucking around with Mojo.” Stare into Lance's eyes. Watch him fidget. I don't really blame him for the bad lead. I don't really blame him for my not being there when the night crew got killed. Without his lead I'd as likely have been hitting the search engine all night. Vij wouldn't have let me sit in with his team. You're not at a hundred percent, obviously. I didn't know. And Lance didn't either. Right? Look away.
Lance's expression isn't quite shock. It isn't quite puzzlement. It's an amalgam of both, and the look of a bright man who is rethinking the scenario after having his facts pulled out from under him. “Shit. I was so sure … the timelines matched up. He didn't go after us at all last night. We didn't log anything except the usual noise-level attacks.” I thought it was over. Lance doesn't say it aloud, but I can see it.
And I know the feeling. Look away.
So we start at the beginning again. I ask, “How did the attack start for you guys, Friday morning?”
Lance nods. “Super Scriptor attack. Script kiddy shit. It got one of my guys to go over the firewall like that. Ten seconds later the guy flatlines in his tank, and a second after that, the intruder barrels through our firewall like it wasn't there. He could have done that all along, but he wanted to make sure we came after him. He wiped out my whole night shift team.”
Lance blinks a few times, then holds his eyes wide open for a few seconds. I know what he's doing. Blinking back tears. I look down, let him have his moment. I understand completely. But there's something fishy here. Something easy for both of us to miss, more even for him than for me, he's older, he runs a bigger network, so he's got more experience than I do. Lance looks at me. “What?”
“I have … a bad feeling, is all. May I see your logs? I'd like to at least upgrade to a theory before I shoot off my mouth.”
He looks at me, a little puzzled now. “Yeah. Sure. Don't you have your own logs? I know your Caltech branch logs everything to keep their asses out of court.”
“We do, but they were on their way to Denver by courier when I left to come here.”
More wary. “So why didn't you just wait the extra day? I know this isn't an easy trip for you.” Engineering again. He's watching me, observing, testing theories. Time for the big lie. I'm sorry, Lance.
“I wanted to move this investigation, nail the perp before he can get away. Parallelize. I'm not the only one who can analyze our logs, but I'm the only one you guys know well enough not to shoot on sight. Plus we all know your security guards are hot for me. They always get out the rubber gloves when I come to visit.” It's a little like online combat. Feint, dodge, use any detail that wandered by and apply it right now. Flash some body to distract, divert. It's so much like online that I have to pull up my old jack's HUD and check it for connections. But I'm offline. For sure.
“You want to set up a conference call and see what OmniMart's analysis team has come up with? We can compare notes.” He's not buying it.
“They won't. They're trying to keep this hush-hush.” Lance is drawing back from me, whatever comfortable familiarity we had is going fast.
“You're right. That is the OmniMart corporate way. I worked for them in Caltech for a few months. Site IT director there is a hand full of engine grease. Bancrier, right? He never struck me as the kind of guy who'd do the right thing when the easy thing was easier. He's why I quit.” Oops.
“You never told me.”
“I left a message on your machine.”
Correct that. It's nothing like online combat. I'm better at online combat, this face to face stuff is for the birds. Come on, you've caught me with my pants down, get it over with.
“Cath, why don't you tell me why you're really here?”
We used to be friends. Now I've come to use him, and he? He has become corporate. Maybe hooking wouldn't be such a bad way to earn a living. By the time this friendly shark's done with me, it might be the only license I can hold. I stop, look down. I've lost again. I'd better stop that, I'm liable to get used to it. And then I'm broken. Useless. I go with the only thing I have left. The truth. “Payback.”
Lance nods. “Thought so. Another tiger hunt, huh? Any idea what your gang got hit with? Sounds like scramblers. Looks like it from the traffic patterns, too.”
I shake my head. “Nothing commercial, that's for sure. I got hit, and I didn't even know it at first.”
Lance looks startled. “Your defense ice didn't notify you?”
“It never detected the attack, even after it was over. And I write my own. I used to think I was pretty good.”
“I used to think so, too. So what happened?”
I look at Lance sharply and he leans back a little, expression concerned. I wonder if he meant that to sting. Corporate. So probably yes. Close my eyes. “Ever written a Ship-in-the-Bottle ice?”
He whistles. “They're tricky. You have to be in the environment they were written for.
“Not mine. It copies the environment from where you run it, then tracks your jump vectors and jumps with you. All you see is some lag.”
“I'd love to see how that works, some time.” Playing good cop to your own bad cop now, Lance? Sneaky.
“No promises. Anyway, the point I'm making is that I hit the intruder with that. Then I cracked him and jumped down his connection into his home hardware.”
Lance goes quiet. When I open my eyes, he's staring at me. “You tracked him home?”
“No, I was in a hurry, I just hijacked his connection. Two ended-spoof.” That draws a raised eyebrow, and I start to feel like I have some control over this … this interface. This conversation. Whatever.
“You cracked him? He's got some intense crypto.”
“So do I. That's why he didn't burn me right away. Anyway, I got to his home machine, and … it was like I was in a gestalt with him. No entry points, no login, nothing, just bang, into the gestalt. But if that's what it was, it was some really sick custom-carved gestalt ice. And next thing I know, I'm in his bottle. But get this. His bottle does the real world. Hi-res, interactive. Not perfect. I think he was getting his data online because he missed important details like my wheelchair, but he covered for it well enough.”
Lance whistles again. “How did you get out before he could burn you?”
“Cussedness, I guess. I finally muddled through some of the confusion he was giving me and EMO'd my tank.” I turn my head to tap on my ear, where my two jack ports are. “NSF jack. First gen, remember? I keep it plugged into the tank controller so I can check on my body while I'm away.
