Part 27 (1/2)

Do I have any choice?

Before she could think about it any further, paralyze herself with indecision, Sly aborted the other utilities she had running. The mirror image, the heat lightning, even the suit of plate mail-all vanished. With a growl of triumph, the two golems converged on her.

The construct of the attack program appeared in her hands. A bulbous, s.p.a.ce-opera laser rifle. She swung the barrel up, pointed it at the nearest golem. It was c.u.mbersome. clumsy, incredibly difficult to aim. (Sly knew that, in reality, her meat body was slumped on a couch in the back room of a cavern, her fingers flying across the keys of her cyberdeck. The clumsiness of the laser rifle represented the difficulty she was having in tailoring the code of a virus program, tweaking it so it'd crash the code of the intrusion countermeasures that were trying to coopt control of her deck. But, like any decker, she'd buried that reality deep. It was so much faster, much more efficient, to think symbolically. But also much more terrifying.) She squeezed the rifle's trigger. With a loud pah of discharging capacitors, the weapon fired. A yellow-white bolt of energy burst from the muzzle, slammed into the torso of the nearest golem, punching a hole clean through it the size of Sly's fist. The thing staggered back, howling. She squeezed the trigger again.

Nothing. The weapon had a recycle time-representing the time it took to modify the code for another a.s.sault on the ice. The high-pitched whine of recharging filled her ears.

The golem was hurt-maybe seriously-but it wasn't going to back off. It lunged at her again while its comrade shambled to the side, trying to flank her.

The laser rifle beeped, and she triggered it again. The bolt took the attacking golem clean in its lack of face, tearing the head from its neck. The ma.s.sive body collapsed to the ground, flickered, then vanished.

The second golem snarled, leaped at her. She couldn't move, couldn't do anything while the rifle recycled. A black fist slammed into the side of her head, smas.h.i.+ng her to the ground. Her scream of pain seemed unimaginably distant in her own ears. The world blurred around her.

Through the crus.h.i.+ng pain, she heard a beep. For an instant didn't realize its significance. Then, just as the golem swung another blow-a killing blow, this time- she squeezed the trigger.

The energy bolt plowed into the monster's belly, knocking it backward. It screamed its agony, flailing wildly at the hole torn in its torso.

But it didn't go down.

Crumpled on the floor, the rifle-useless until it recharged-in her hands. Sly watched death approach. Looming three meters above her, the golem snarled down at her. Enjoying itself. Slowly raised a foot high, ready to slam it down and crush her skull.

Too slowly. The rifle beeped. Sly clamped down on the trigger.

The energy bolt ripped upward into the construct at a steep angle. Blasted into its groin, tearing up through its torso, exiting from the back of its neck. It teetered there for a moment, then toppled toward her. Pixelated and vanished an instant before it struck her.

Sly just lay there, gasping. The laser rifle felt crus.h.i.+ngly heavy in her hands-meaning that the programming effort of keeping the utility code running was becoming too much. She let it deactivate, saw the construct flicker and disintegrate.

I did it. . . . The metabolic poisons of fear and exhaustion were flowing through her body, making her muscles feel leaden, and giving her a sick headache. With an Olympian effort, she forced herself to her feet. Looked around her. The office was empty.

But maybe not for long. She had to get out of here now.

She took a moment to run a medic program, to restore at least some of the damage the ice had inflicted on her persona programs. She ran the construct-a complex science-fictional ”scanner”-over her body, felt at least a portion of her energy returning. Some of the damage she'd suffered had been real, she knew, affecting her meat body directly-surges in blood pressure had probably burst capillaries, strained heart valves. But she also knew that those things would heal with time.

Which, of course, she didn't have now. She had to get out of this node-somehow-relocate back to the satlink. But how?

She started to initiate an a.n.a.lyze utility-hosed it the first time, had to try again. The utility's construct appeared as a pair of goggles, which she slipped over her icon's eyes. She started to scan the walls of the ”office.”

There it was, what she knew she had to find. A concealed ”door,” a rectangle of wall that s.h.i.+mmered when viewed through the goggles-a dataline leading out of this node. Another utility told her there was no security on the ”door”-nothing to stop her from using it-but couldn't tell her what was on the other side. Apparently, there was some kind of discontinuity that blocked the utility's scan.

That was rea.s.suring. She'd certainly experienced a discontinuity when she'd been shunted here. If she was lucky, this dataline would lead her back to the satlink. She took a deep breath, readied herself. And plunged through the doorway.

A moment of blackness, of vertigo and disorientation. And then the virtual reality reestablished itself around her.

Luck was with her. She was back at the satlink node. Actually within the construct this time. The blue structural elements formed a lattice around her. The beads of ice still shuttled up and down along the elements. Fear twisted her belly for an instant, but then she realized they weren't paying any attention whatsoever to her icon. Why should they? she reasoned. I'm inside now; they're looking for intruders coming from outside.

She looked around. The lattice-work parabolic dish of the satlink was above her, pointing up into the sky. When viewing the construct from without, she hadn't seen anything extending from the dish, anything that could have been the dataline to Zurich-Orbital. Now, from her new vantage point, she couldn't miss it. A faint, s.h.i.+mmering tube of sky-blue light, lancing into the heavens.

Z-O, here I come, she thought, then plunged into the dataline.

There was something . . . not right . . . about how Sly felt as she sped up the dataline. Some sense of . . . disconnection, though that didn't quite describe it either. At first she thought it was a mental artifact, some kind of aftereffect of her combat with Jurgensen, with the golems. But then she realized it had to be the time delay that T. S. had mentioned. Depending on the geometry of the link-the number of sidelinks necessary to communicate with the Zurich-Orbital habitat-the light-speed lag could be three-quarters of a second, an eternity at computer speeds. She tried to imagine what it would be like without the compensator chip that T. S. said was installed in the deck, then gave up; this disconnected feeling was disturbing enough.

She'd expected there to be something distinctive about the system access node leading into the Zurich-Orbital system-something that reflected its importance. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just another SAN, following the Universal Matrix Specification standards, appearing as a simple door in a s.h.i.+ning silver wall.

Sly stopped outside the SAN, ran a selection of a.n.a.lyze programs on it. As she expected, the door was a glacier-almost solid ice. Nothing lethal that the utilities could detect, but enough barrier and trace ice to overload a less powerful node.

Nothing that Mary Windsong's slick utilities-backed by the punch of Theresa Smeland's deck-couldn't sleaze their way past. The ice accepted Sly's forged pa.s.scodes, and the door swung open. She slipped silently into the heart of the Zurich-Orbital computer system.

Through an SPU-a sub-processor unit-and into a CPU. Probably one of many, she guessed. Most modern systems were ”ma.s.sively parallel”-the term currently in vogue-with multiple CPUs, sharing the processing overhead of the system. Cloaked, so that any ice or deckers in the CPU wouldn't spot her, she called up a system map.

Then, with stunning clarity she realized she'd reached her destination. She didn't have to go any further. There was a public bulletin board system-well, ”public” with respect to people who had access to the Corporate Court's computer-to which all multinational corporations contributed. It comprised a single datastore connected to a dedicated SPU-which was, in turn, linked with the subordinate CPU where Sly was. All she had to do was upload Louis' stolen datafile from her cyberdeck to the CPU. Order the CPU to transfer it to the SPU, along with an instruction to post it in a read-only section of the datastore. Simple.

Too simple, part of her mind yammered. But no. It took just a couple of clock ticks to write the appropriate code, to feed it into the CPU's command stack. She watched an execution trace of the CPU's activity, saw her command get processed normally. Saw the creation of the data packets containing the paydata plus the appropriate instructions to the SPU, A few cycles later, she ran a listing of new postings on the BBS and saw the still-encrypted data appear, with file attributes of readonly and PROTECTED.

It would still be possible, but incredibly difficult, for someone to delete the file. The subordinate CPU where Sly was had the ability to post entries to the BBS data-store. But it didn't have the authority to delete a posting or even change its attributes or status. If somebody wanted to do that, they'd have to penetrate a lot deeper into the Zurich-Orbital system.

How difficult would that be? To find out, Sly ordered the subordinate CPU to display the security ratings of the nodes surrounding the central CPU cl.u.s.ter. Reading the lines of data, she had to suppress a shudder. Not a chance, she told herself. Any decker even thinking about penetrating the central CPU cl.u.s.ter might as well just shoot himself in the head. The result would be no less certain, and it'd probably hurt less.

I can't believe it. I'm out from under. . . .

It still didn't seem real. Maybe it wouldn't for a long time-maybe not until she'd returned to Seattle and saw everything was back to normal. But did she want to go back to Seattle?

She shook her head. Here in the middle of the Corporate Court's computer system wasn't the time or the place to worry about it. She reviewed things in her mind. Had she forgotten anything?

Satisfied that she had not, Sly jacked out.

32.

0613 hours, November 16, 2053 It was like a bad case of deja vu, Falcon thought. Sly jacking in, doing . . . something. And then all h.e.l.l breaking loose around her, with him afraid to jack her out before she was ready. Afraid not to jack her out, because the woman-plus-cyberdeck combination-tied to the wall, to the phone jack, and from there to the Matrix-limited their options so much. He didn't understand what she was doing, not really. And the not understanding made it all worse.

There'd been no real warning. Everything had been quiet, with Mary squatting on the floor next to Sly, watching her carefully. At first Falcon had thought that's all it was-just watching. But then he'd kind of . . . opened up his perception-that was the best way he could think of it. Opened himself up to additional data, data that wasn't coming in through his normal senses. Kind of the way he'd been opened to the alternate reality of the plane of the totems. And then he'd understood that Mary, too, was using senses other than the five normal ones to monitor Sly and how her body was reacting.

Twice he'd seen Sly twitch. The first time like somebody had touched her unexpectedly. The second time like somebody had goosed her hard-or like she was on some kind of drug trip gone bad. He'd wanted to jack her out right there, free her from whatever it was that was tormenting her. He'd turned to Mary, worried, questioning her with his eyes.

But Mary shook her head. ”She's hurting,” the shaman said. ”Hurting bad, maybe. But it's not critical yet.” He'd wanted to yell at her, to say any hurting was critical after the abuse Sly had suffered from the black box in that small concrete room. But Mary just looked at him calmly. ”This is important, right?” she said. And all he could do was nod.

And it was then the gunfire started. The booming of single-shot weapons, the harsh ripping of autofire. m.u.f.fled by the closed door, but obviously coming from the barroom of the tavern.

”What the frag is that!” Falcon demanded.

Mary hadn't answered at once, just rested her shoulder against the couch, closed her eyes, let her chin sink down onto her chest. He wanted to shake her, then realized that she'd gone astral-the same way he'd gone astral to find and rescue Sly. Falcon wanted to join her, but he didn't know how. Not by himself, not without the help of Wolf. He tried to summon up the song he'd heard in the forest on that distant plane. He was able to remember it, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't feel it vibrating through him like before, was unable to sing along with it.

Mary came back almost immediately, opening her eyes again, flowing to her feet. He knew at once from her expression that it was something bad.

”There's heavy drek going down in the barroom,” she told him tersely. ”Some new guys came in-strangers; none of the regulars knew them. They headed for the back room. Cahill”-that was the bartender, Falcon recalled-”tried to stop them. They shot him.

”There were five regulars out front-drinking their breakfast here like they usually do-and four strangers. There's a real pitched battle going on. Two strangers down, three regulars.”