Codespell webmage book 3, p.28
Codespell (WebMage Book 3), page 28
Between the storm and the lack of anything remotely resembling traction, we spent a lot of time moving in directions other than forward—most notably up and down, with seriously ugly consequences for the contents of my stomach—but somehow we got steadily closer to our goal. That might have been the strangest thing of all. Despite the fact that the island stood barely a yard above the surrounding water, no waves broke over its surface, leaving it bone-dry. Eventually, we arrived.
“**** ******!” Nothing happened. It started dancing in place to keep from sinking. “******* ********* ******** *******.”
“I’m not sure what it just said, but if that wasn’t swearing, I’ll eat my slipcover,” said Melchior.
“*****?”
With a creak, the top of the island opened, exposing a flight of stairs. Down we went. At the bottom, we had to pass through another watertight pressure door. I couldn’t help but notice an increase in the ruffled-plumage factor as we did so.
Beyond lay a big tomblike room filled with racks and racks of slick-looking black multiprocessor servers, each with its own bank of blinking red LEDs. Imagine Giorgio Armani designing the interior of the great pyramid of Cheops as data center—sober and clean-lined, and this was the old hardware. It read as professional but also shockingly cool right up to the point where I realized that all that red was alert lights. The whole damn server farm needed a reboot.
I walked to the nearest box and held down the power button. For several seconds nothing happened. Then, with a swooshing-boooong sort of noise, the computer reset itself. The red light went out, replaced by a lambent purple one.
“I love that,” said Mel. “Very power geek.”
I imagined all the red replaced by that deep vivid purple. OK, it was still a pretty cool design statement. Much more so than the coral-reef thing that was replacing it, but hey, in the IT biz, if you don’t move with the times, they bury you.
“So now what?” I asked.
“You look for any live machines while the Left Hand of Necessity here puts all those limbs to use doing manual re-boots. ”
“*** **, **** ********?”
Either the spinnerette was getting better at tone, or I was starting to get used to its subtleties, because that almost made sense.
“Because somebody’s got to do it, and Ravirn and I both have other jobs,” said Melchior. Apparently it was starting to make sense to him, too.
The spinnerette sighed but walked to the nearest server bank and started pushing buttons. By balancing on four legs and stretching, it was able to hold down six at once. As the boooong noise sounded in chorus, Melchior turned back to me.
“The live boxes are running all that’s left of the master control program. Shara didn’t know much about it, so you get to try to parse it on the fly, then package it for porting.”
“Doesn’t that just sound like fun?” I suppressed an urge to make raspberry noises. “From the way you say that, I have to assume you won’t be looking over my shoulder and helping me make sense of the thing.”
“No, because someone also has to reconnect the old copper trunk lines so that once you’ve figured out the ways, there’s also a means. According to the schematics Shara showed me, I go this way.” He pointed along the wall to left.
“Write if you find work,” I called after him, “especially if it’s got happy little purple running lights.” Then I turned the other way.
“Mail’s dead,” replied Melchior, his voice receding, “but I’ll keep an eye out.”
“So e-mail me,” I tossed over my shoulder.
“Will do.”
The first couple of dozen rows of racks were a solid mass of winking red eyes. I finally saw my very first spot of purple way down at the end of row thirty or thereabouts. I made a mental note of it and moved on. I’d work off a single box if I had to, but a cluster would be much better. I passed a couple more singletons and one triplet before I hit the jackpot, a row where about half the computers looked to be in working order. Now I just needed an interface device. Unfortunately, there was a distinct lack of keyboards and monitors, though there was an abundance of networking cable.
I checked the far end of the row but didn’t find anything there either. That didn’t leave me a lot of options—one really, and I didn’t like it at all. Jacking my one and only soul into a badly virus-thrashed multibox supercomputer system designed to control the destiny of the gods seemed like the worst idea I’d had in years. Not that that kind of thing had ever stopped me in the past.
I pulled out my athame and collected a length of cable. I plugged one end into the closest active machine and the other into the athame. Then I sat down on the floor, my back braced against the nearest rack, my new sword cane lying across my knees. As I set the narrow blade of the athame against my palm, my stomach replayed a sort of highlights reel of the way it had felt during our recent spider-dance across the waves.
“I don’t like it either,” I said to my stomach. Melchior wasn’t there; who else was I going to talk to?”
I pressed the blade into my skin. Blood welled . . . and I screamed, yanking the athame free and throwing it away. Tethered to the cable as it was, it didn’t go far.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
As the point entered my flesh, I’d felt as though the universe had split in two, with me straddling the divide. In one version, I’d sunk the athame in quickly, catapulting myself into . . . madness! There was nothing sane in the virtual environment I’d entered, no hint of normal structure, and I’d felt it pulling me under, devouring me. At the very same time, looking out through my other eye, I saw myself doing what I had just done, pulling the blade free before the irretrievably cracked system could swallow me.
Sweat covered me like a second—liquid—skin, and I could feel all of the Raven’s feathers, as though they’d gone beyond standing on end and actually tried to flee my body in search of a safer location. It seemed like a fabulous idea. I wanted to do a little fleeing myself. Dead was one thing. Trapped forever in a program gone insane, entirely another. I couldn’t even bring myself to pick up the athame as I got shakily to my feet. I was not going to try that again, not for love or money or threat of death. I would turn up a keyboard and monitor or get Melchior to whistle me up a set if that didn’t work.
I passed the spinnerette on my way back to let Melchior know what happened. It had continued methodically down the rows, leaving a trail of purple lights behind it. It took me a little longer to find Melchior because he’d crawled several yards down a huge conduit that came in through the far wall. I’d have missed him completely if I hadn’t noticed the ragged end of a huge tangle of cables twitching occasionally.
“Hey, Mel, we’ve got a problem. I need to talk to you.”
“Just a second. See that pile of cable?”
“Yeah.”
“Pull on it.”
I grabbed and yanked. Slowly, a couple hundred pounds of bundled cable slid out into the open, with Melchior riding it. I got about ten feet free before it jerked to a stop.
“That’s all there is this side of the firestop,” said Melchior. “I just hope it’s enough. Help me get it over to the router cabinet.”
As we wrestled the mass into place behind an old-fashioned patch panel, I quickly and briefly told Melchior about my run-in with the system.
He grimaced before wedging himself into the narrow gap at the back of the panel. “Nasty. Try the next cabinet over. There’s a bunch of odds and ends in there, and I thought I saw a monitor.”
We didn’t have much time, so I left him to his task and went to check out the cabinet. As I hurried away, I heard him whistle the opening code of Snake Charmer. The cable ends rose up around him like so many dancing cobras, suggesting that this spell was going to work a whole lot better than his attempt to conjure me a rapier.
Two minutes later, I was plugging a badly scratched monitor and a keyboard missing its caps lock key into a machine a couple over from the one I’d tried earlier. I left it and my athame right where they were. Unfortunately, the alternate interface couldn’t help much with the content. The image on the monitor was just as crazy as the one that had almost consumed my soul. On-screen it read as a sort Brownian sea of alphanumeric characters in every ethnic flavor from Roman and Arabic through Korean and Chinese to Greek and Russian. All in shades of pink for some reason.
It wasn’t chaos—that I could have dealt with. It was order gone horribly wrong. Looking at it made my brain hurt. I tried hitting escape, and command-escape, and control-altdelete and every other override I could think of for a dozen operating systems, all to no avail. Then I tried simply staring in the direction of the screen, trying to see without looking so that my subconscious could search for hidden patterns. All I got out of that was a strong urge to return my last meal to the wild and an ever-increasing paranoia about the approach of Nemesis.
I wasn’t going to get anywhere from the inside. That was as certain as Dionysus’s morning hangover. I hurried to the nearest of the machines the spinnerette had reset to see what the reboot looked like. Same thing, only considerably less so. Still pink, still running the Brownian-motion screen-saver, but this time with fewer characters and all of them native to a Greek keyboard, though as I watched, the whole thing seemed to shift steadily toward the wilder scene of the original.
All right, so whatever it was, it infected or reinfected new machines added to the system. In that it acted like a virus. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Persephone’s effort was long since departed, but maybe it had left something behind that acted like an after-infection. I picked up monitor and keyboard and moved again, this time choosing a rack of crashed machines in the line opposite from where Melchior was working. After I’d held down the power button long enough to generate a boooong, I checked in with him.
“I’ve got all the connections to the patch panel reattached. I’m working on a kludge to get from there to the computer side while bypassing the weednet interface. Then I have to reset the switching computer for the old network, and we’ll see what happens. Hopefully, that’ll give Shara access. You?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.”
As the server finished its boot cycle, rational text started scrolling by on my salvaged monitor, black letters on a blue background reading off system resources and . . . as it hit the network queries, the text blinked once, turned pink, and started to slither away from the rational. With a sigh, I physically removed the next box over from the network and hit reboot.
While I waited, I stuck the end of the sword cane through two of my belt loops and loosened the grip so it would draw easily. A few minutes later and closer to the inevitable arrival of Nemesis, I had a working machine. That lasted from the time I turned on every security measure I could think of until I reconnected it to the network. At that point: happy, dancing pink letters.
I had just gotten up a really good head of profanity when a hollow boom sounded from somewhere above.
Into the silence that followed, Melchior—still working madly away—said, “Don’t stop. If ever there was a reason to swear, it’s the one knocking on the front door right now.”
Another boom, this one followed by a sharp crack like shattering tile. A third, and sea air suddenly stirred the room. I drew my sword and moved to a point where I could see the base of the stairs. I was wishing we’d redogged the hatch, though that probably wouldn’t have held for long.
“What’s the word on the connection work-around?” I called over my shoulder, all the while keeping my eyes fixed on the entrance.
Boom.
“Hope,” replied Melchior.
“Care to elaborate?”
“Everything’s done except flipping the switch and hoping for a miracle.”
Smash. Thud. Howl. Something above had changed.
“Maybe that’s the cavalry arriving,” said Melchior. “Have you got a plan for the port?”
“Yep,” I said.
More crashes and howls sounded above, followed by the roar of the storm. Water started to dribble down the stairs. Apparently, whatever protected the island from waves had just broken.
“What’s the plan?” asked Melchior.
“You flip the switch, and we hope for a miracle.”
“I was afraid that was what you were going to say. Here’s hoping.”
I heard a click from behind me. It was followed by a tremendous crack from the top of the stairs. The flow of water increased, forming a large puddle. A limp bundle of green and beige tumbled down the steps to land with a splash. Megaera. Unconscious. Or dead.
Another bundle followed a moment later, this one snarling as it fell. At the last minute, it turned the tumble into something more like a roll, landing on its feet next to the fallen Fury. Nemesis.
Orange light flared in the stairwell, and a seething mass of flame dropped into view, completely enveloping Nemesis. Tisiphone, I assumed, though I couldn’t make out anything resembling human shape in that great, writhing ball of fire. As it hit the puddle, water hissed into steam, briefly obscuring my view and no doubt wrecking the closest racks of servers. I winced then and again as the two combatants slammed into a row of computers. A horrible clanging started up then.
“Oh shit,” snapped Melchior from behind me.
“What?” I risked a glance over my shoulder.
He was standing on the console of the switching computer. Behind him, lights danced across its face. Whether those meant that the computers in this room were once more connected to the main network of Necessity or just that the system was slowly shorting out was an open question. And the alarm?
“Halon system,” said Melchior. “Fire suppression.”
That was bad. “Can you find the override or whistle one up?” A halon system would flood the room with an inert nonflammable gas, one that would starve any fire of the air it needed to burn, suffocating it . . . and us.
“Working on it.” Melchior scrambled toward the back corner of the room, where a flashing light accompanied the alarm.
If we were lucky, there would be a switch there, one that would delay the halon release for as long as it was held down plus some very short number of minutes afterward to allow the button pusher a chance to escape. If we were unlucky—
“Got it!” yelled Melchior. Then he let out a quick burst of codespell. “Damn.”
“What?” I yelled.
“Magic doesn’t seem to work on the system. I’m going to have to stay here and hold the button if you don’t want to give up on breathing.”
That made us safe, for the moment, from the halon, at the cost of immobilizing Melchior. I was still trying to figure out what to do next when I realized the light had changed. The fires had gone out.
I turned back toward the door. Nemesis stood alone at the base of the stairs. I couldn’t see Tisiphone. Nemesis smiled and stepped over Megaera’s crumpled form, sauntering in my direction.
As she got closer, I couldn’t help but blanch at the ravaged condition of the body she animated. It had once been my cousin Dairn. No more. Half of his face was gone, exposing raw bone, though both mirrored eyes remained. His hair and clothes had burned away completely, and the flesh underneath was charred black where it wasn’t torn. I could still see the holes made by my gun in our last encounter and the deep gouge Tisiphone had torn in his side.
“Why aren’t you dead?” I whispered.
“Hate.” The voice was female but not feminine, and it didn’t come from the body’s closed mouth but, rather, from somewhere in the chest.
“For me? You shouldn’t have. I mean, I’m flattered and all, but—”
“For you?” growled Nemesis, still advancing. “No. For Necessity. For this.” She threw an arm out to take in the racks and racks of servers. “For three thousand years bound and bodiless in the pits of Tartarus.” She was only a few yards away by now.
“You’re barely an afterthought, the last petty wishes of this”—she pinched the flesh of a cheek that had once belonged to my cousin, tearing a piece free—“sad thing.” She opened her fingers and let it fall wetly to the ground at my feet. “Its wants and needs are no longer important. As soon as I’ve finished my business here, I’ll be moving to a new, far more appropriate, home. Do you prefer water?” Her eyes flicked back toward Megaera. “Or fire?”
I whipped my sword across her abdomen in a drawing cut. Designed for thrusting, the blade should have done little more than leave a bloody slice. Instead—maybe because of the abuse she’d already taken—it opened her up so that . . . things fell out. I tried not to look at them as I hopped backwards to give myself room.
As I began a lunge, I heard a self-harmonizing whistle start up behind me—Melchior—just barely audible over the continuing alarm bells. Nemesis whistled back, though otherwise she didn’t move, seeming to ignore me. I drove my blade straight at her left eye. Almost casually, she brought her open palm up between us so that my point slid between the bones of her hand and out the other side. Perhaps a foot of it had gone through when she twisted her wrist, yanking the hilt free of my grasp. She looked speculatively at it.
“You’re hardly worth the effort.” The words continued to echo out of her chest and didn’t even slow the speed of the whistled code coming from her lips as she dueled magically with Melchior. “But you are between me and my rightful prey.” She caught the hilt in her own right hand and yanked it free.
With a move as fast as any Fury’s, she thrust the point through my right biceps and deep into the stone wall of the room. Then, leaving me pinned like a butterfly, she passed me by. Whistle and counterwhistle continued as she headed for the connection Melchior had put together.
The pain from my arm was nauseating. I had to keep swallowing to hang on to the bile that threatened to rise up from my much-abused stomach. I turned as far as I could without twisting the blade in my wound. She had reached the switching computer and seemed to be examining the pattern of the lights. Why? It couldn’t actually be working could it? Making the port I had failed to set up?
