Part 5 (2/2)

From the floor, Bowdie looked up from fixing a setting on the cargo sled. His dark brown hair was thick and wavy, with an unruly lock that fell across one eyebrow. His nose had been broken three or four times, and one of his cheekbones had been shattered and restructured with coral implants. His skin was we&thered and tough, coa.r.s.e with the pockmarks from some obscure disease. It somehow matched the mottled coloring of his weapons harness, where age had worn away at the fabric. And although some part of her brain registered his coa.r.s.e complexion, her whole attention was struck by his eyes: beautiful eyes, wide and haunted, as brown as the earth, with long, thick lashes that belonged on a woman's face. Instinctively, she opened her biogate to search for the sense of his biofield. There was a heat there, she discovered. An eagerness like Kurvan's, but steady and strong, with sparks that seemed like challenges, where the other mere's seemed reckless and sharp with disdain. As if, in Bowdie's field, confidence and fatalism had combined in a deep, banked pit of fire. As Bowdie regarded Jandon, his brown eyes narrowed, and he paused in fixing the sled settings. ”You have the guide,” he said. ”Won't that give you the edge?”

Jandon shook his head at Bowdie's question. ”A single guide can't check every trail. And yes, we have a second guide”-he forestalled Bowdie's automatic protest-”but she's working the reclamation vats.”

Wren s.h.i.+fted almost imperceptibly, and Nitpicker nodded at him to speak. ”If you take our shooters,” Wren said slowly, ”you're crippling our team. Our setup relies on a number of bodies to be effective.”

”Yes, but you're going in early, and you're going in for setup, not defense, like us. You won't have any action for three, maybe even four weeks. You don't need all your shooters right now.”

From beside Tsia, Tucker paused in his weapons check. ”What if the s.h.i.+ppers send the biochips in early?”

Kurvan glanced at the younger mere. ”No freepick would take s.h.i.+pment an entire month early.”

”Why not?”

”The Hollows is a new stake, and the freepicks there won't have finished their preliminary scans, let alone the detailed scans of the biologicals they'll have to work around. They won't know half the biocodes they'll need for coring, processing, or reclamation. You program a set of biocodes in a chip, and that chip can be used only in the gear for which it was set-and only for the codes it recognizes. Nothing else.” Kurvan tapped the hilt of the laze he carried on his harness. ”Like this won't recognize a biological-only humans. Take a corer,” he added, ”one of those wide-beam, short-range lazes. They're programmed for whatever ground-mineral deposits-the freepicks have at their stake. Without the codes for worms and insects and roots, even the best corer couldn't break through rock that was protected by a layer of those things. Without the right biocodes, the chips in the corer won't acknowledge organic matter as licensed for disintegration. They also won't recognize any bacts-bacteria-over the amount specified by the site license. One pocket of roots over the licensed amount, and the corers automatically halt. You stop the corers, and you stop the mining. No cargo, so no s.h.i.+pping, so no payment. Freepicks almost always work hand-to-mouth as far as credit goes. And with the cost of a set of biochips and the codes that go into them, they can't afford to make mistakes. All it takes is a single missing or mispro-grammed code, and they'd lose their entire stake. An early s.h.i.+pment could make those chips as worthless as if they'd been left hissing on the sand.”

”You're as bad on nodie stuff as Striker is on the Fetal Wars,” Tucker said. ”So the chips come in early.

There's no reason they have to be programmed right away.”

”You want to sit on a s.h.i.+pment of chips for a month, just waiting for blackjack to heist them?

Unprogrammed biochips are practically priceless, and they have a subtle but distinct signature. With the right gear, hiding a set of biochips on-site would be about as effective as painting them with neon colors and hoisting them on a scanpole. And until the programmer sets the biocodes, anyone can move in.

Blackjack, Draynes, Ixia... One blank biocode bank and-”

”-a chip can become a weapon.” Tucker resealed the other side of his pack.

”Yes,” Kurvan agreed sharply. ”Not only could you code for a crop-plant or livestock species, you could code for an alien or human. Unprogrammed, a biochip is as dangerous as an idea in a house of fanatics.”

”Maybe not as bad as that,” Wren said casually.

Kurvan paused, then grinned in spite of himself. ”Maybe not, but it is dangerous. To have them on-

site... That's just asking for a raid.”

Nitpicker glanced at Jandon. ”You have two of the new handscanners?” He nodded. 'Take the rest of

ours. We'll keep the old, shorter-range ones. Take half our config gear, too. We'll replace ours tomorrow after we get a message through to the guild. How many shooters do you want?”

Kurvan glanced at Jandon. ”You going to set up a manual scannet?”

Jandon hesitated. ”Have to now. So, four, I think.”

Tucker paused as he checked the antigrav on his pack. ”Four of our shooters? Are you crazy?”

Doetzier straightened from where he leaned on the wall. ”Who gets the guide?”

Tucker turned to Nitpicker. ”If Jandon gets our shooters, we get the guide. She knows all the ridges and

half the scree beds between here and the northern Vulcans.”

Nitpicker looked at Doetzier. ”What do you think?”

Doetzier tilted his head at Kurvan. ”He's the line-runner in this group-ask him, not me. I'm just the

configuration grunt. I haven't a clue how long the node will stay down, let alone how it got down in the first place.”

Wren popped a slimchim in his mouth. ”It's not hard to knock down a node,” he put in. ”Especially if you have inside help. One crooked tech or nodie, and the traders can slip in and out through a darkened net like rats through a shredded screen. Remember that customs tech four years ago? He went on the grayscale and jammed up the s.h.i.+pping for more than a week. He took his credit and ran to blackjack, and he's so far away now that even the s.h.i.+elds can't touch him.”

s.h.i.+elds and s.h.i.+pping, customs and Shjams... Tsia stretched her gate unconsciously. To touch her sister... Catspeak flooded into her mind and made her lips curl. Cougar heartbeats pulsed with hers. Seasickness rose up in her gut and stabbed her with a twinge of discomfort. She wiped her hands on her trousers. From across the room, Doetzier noticed the movement with sharp eyes. Tsia followed his gaze to her hands and stilled them.

”What do you think, Feather?” Doetzier asked.

”About what?” Tsia regarded him warily.

”Where you go. You're a terrain artist-almost the same thing as a line-runner. You should have as much say as Kur-van.”

She shrugged. ”If the node is jammed, my skills as a terrain artist are almost moot. Let the guilders get into the terrain before I do, and they can set a hundred prepared ghost webs before I finish a single manual scan. Anything I scanned out would simply pick up their preset signals, not the real terrain in the area. And although I could sense the life-forms fine on the trail, I'd never be able to cover all the ground before the guilders moved in on the stake.”

Doetzier seemed to pounce. ”You think the node is jammed, not down?”

She looked at him warily. ”Daya, how should I know? I was just thinking out loud.”

Nitpicker studied her expression. ”It takes a lot less do-all to dark a net than to drop a node.”

”If you have the technology,” Kurvan added.

Nifpicker gave him a hard look. ”There are three races in this quadrant alone who have better jamming technology than ours. One of them-the Ixia-is in orbit around Risthmus. You don't think the Ixia would sell a jammer to blackjack-especially if the price was right? If blackjack came up with some of the tech toys the Ixia have been after for the past thirty years? And what about the Draynes or the bug-eyes? They're in the same position as the Ixia, and their s.p.a.ce is even closer to ours.”

Wren glanced at Tsia and made a subtle sign with his hands, finning a message. She nodded almost imperceptibly. The Draynes, Wren's finger motions told her, were a mammalian life-form-like badgers.

Doetzier's eyes flicked as he caught the last subtle finning from Wren, but he said nothing. Nitpicker added, ”Blackjack have slipped through the scannet a dozen times in the last forty years. The word is that the mining guild has standing orders with them for any Risthmus biotechnology. One bad nodie on the orbiting hammers, as Wren said, is all it would take to dark the scannet enough to let a zek down and then back out.”

Doetzier glanced at Kurvan. ”You're a line-runner. How long would it take you to set a web that could hide a sabotage job well enough to dump the node?”

The other man shrugged. ”Six to ten months minimum. Two years at the outside. Maybe more. Depends on how many webs get messed up by the construction.”

”That second docking hammer?” Tucker queried. ”The one on the elliptical orbit?”

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