The Eternal Prison (15 page)

 

I watched her inch away from me. The strange thing was, I believed her.

 

 

 

 

XI

IT’S ALL RIGHT. YOU
DID
LOOK KIND OF SAD ABOUT IT

 

 

 

 

“Don’t open your fucking mouth,” I advised Marko with a raised hand. “I might have the urge to put something in it.”

 

Marko appeared to be trying to push himself into the far wall. He’d gained some weight, his hair had swallowed most of the rest of his face, and his affected glasses had gotten smaller and more stylish. He bent slowly, his eyes locked on me, and retrieved his dropped handheld. Instead of the old Technical Associate jumpsuit, he was wearing a moderately luxurious suit and held the handheld in front of his belly as if it were going to protect him. I gave the device a few extra seconds of my attention—for all I knew about tech it just might shoot energy beams at me.

 

“Mr. Marko is a friend of the cause,” Krasa said from behind me, slicing my bracelets off with a jerk. “He saved my life.”

 

I gave Marko a merry wink. “How’s that?”

 

“He’s been farming the SSF network,” she said, stepping back around me. “Keyword searches dumped to a private net of his that he’s walled off on his own. I was chasing down my partner, trying to figure out what had happened to him, and Marko saw the Worms red flagging all of my Standard Incident Reports and activity logs. He cleaned up my files and passed the word to me.”

 

“I, uh,” Marko said slowly, licking his plump lips, and then his eyes, tiny in the midst of so much hair, flashed to me in apprehension.

 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I sighed. “Speak.”

 

“I’ve been evolving my opinion of the System Security Force.”

 

I nodded. “Okay. Marko’s a revolutionary. Fucking fantastic. Why hasn’t Mr. Wizard been processed himself?”

 

“The Technical Corps is still largely untouched, for some reason,” Krasa said.

 

“Marin’s worried about complex and creative thought,” Marko said. “Worried that the algorithms won’t capture it. He’s afraid to process the Technical staff and some of the higher Worms until he’s more sure of himself.” He licked his pink lips. “Unfortunately, most of the Tech staff is voluntarily working on this for him.”

 

I pulled the one chair out from the table, and Marko made a low, whimpering sound, putting his hands up a little higher. Krasa lit a cigarette.

 

“You two know each other?” she asked. She sounded like this was the least surprising thing she’d ever heard.

 

I grinned. “Mr. Marko left me for dead not so long ago.” I winked at Marko as his eyes popped open. “It’s all right. You
did
look kind of sad about it, as I recall.” I spread my hands. “Calm down. You had Hense up your ass and what the fuck were you going to do?” I remembered Janet Hense, avatar, sailing around Bellevue, kicking the entire world’s ass. “Okay. Forget it. Zeke, you’re not high on my list, okay? You’re not even in the first
volume.
Sit down, relax, and let’s help each other out.”

 

Slowly, he nodded and peeled himself from the wall. I didn’t feel anything for Marko—no hate or anger; although I did feel mean, grim satisfaction that he’d apparently spent the last year and a half terrified that I might come back to kill him. He slowly approached the table, shooting his cuffs and adjusting his collar. He glanced at his handheld and gestured at it before setting it on the table, his hand lingering on it for a moment as if reluctant to let go. Then he pushed his hands into his pockets.

 

“Okay,” he said, licking his lips. “Okay. Let’s.”

 

“He was slipped under the door by our mutual friend,” Krasa said.

 

Marko blinked his tiny eyes. His lips were permanently wet, glistening under the harsh light. “Ruberto sent you?”

 

For a second, my mind was blank, and then I was irritated. “No one
sent
me, Mr. Marko. He
asked
me to come here.” I found my smile again. It felt fake on my face, but I put it on anyway. “He asked me to do him a favor.”

 

“Kill Marin,” Krasa said, her voice flat. “That’s the fucking
favor.
”

 

Marko’s face tightened up, his nostrils, bits of pink flesh in the midst of his jungle of hair, flaring anxiously. “You’re aware of Director Marin’s special… attributes?”

 

I nodded. “Hard to kill the Man of a Million Avatars, yeah, I know. That’s why I’m here, in this room, Marko: fact-finding. I thought I’d have to
look
for you—but figured if I could find you, I’d have a source of information.” I nodded, spreading my hands. “I am a genius.”

 

“Hard to kill,” Marko said musingly. He started to pace. I got the impression he was slowly forgetting there was anyone else in the room. “That’s nice. You can’t
kill
Director Marin.”

 

I nodded impatiently. “You can turn the fucking Kremlin into dust,” I said forcefully, trying to will Marko to stop speaking. “I need information, and I don’t think we can just buy it. I’ve been given a target, one of Marin’s key lieutenants —”

 

“Gall,” Krasa said immediately. “Horatio Gall. Marin’s right hand.”

 

I glanced at her but didn’t say anything.

 

“Gall,” Marko said. “Jebus, you mean Gall.
Major
Gall. Oh, fuck, Cates—why
not
go for Marin himself? You think you’re saving yourself trouble by going for his fucking
right hand?
”

 

I shrugged. “Gall is just the first step. Information, then we make a plan.”

 

He shook his head, suddenly confident and animated. “You want Gall, you
still
need Marin. He’s so close to Marin—he’s Marin’s
moon.
His itinerary, his security protocols, the officer assigned to his personal valet—you need information. Information that you can only get from Marin’s network.”

 

He smiled suddenly. “Mr. Cates, you don’t need a Gunner, you need a
hacker.
Marin is a
cloud,
he’s a network unto himself. What you need to do”— Marko suddenly resumed, twirling his hand again —“is get a world-class Techie type, someone who can understand the algorithms and encryption, the nanotech and spider-busses. Someone who can hack the Prime’s cloud, extract the data without tripping alarms. Sure, sure—nothing simpler. The System is
crawling
with guys of that caliber.” I found I didn’t like Marko when Marko got sarcastic. “You’d need someone like Squalor. Or Miles Amblen.”

 

No one said anything for a moment. Every Techie I’d ever met used Amblen’s name half a dozen times in the first five minutes of a discussion—the Amblen Protocol, the Amblen Theorem. Amblen was a typical old-school Techie, like Squalor: Pre-Unification he’d been famous, too, a brilliant academic. After Unification he hadn’t been able to work on the System’s leash and had gone underground.

 

I leaned forward. “How would you even access the
cloud?
”

 

Marko started pacing again, shaking his head. “That’s easy, easy. The avatar architecture is two-way. Marin—any avatar—has to be able to collate new information from his avatars. They have to be able to interact with the control node, to supply information, and the control node needs to be able to take direct control whenever it wants. Any avatar could be made into a two-way gate to Marin’s network. Then you’ll be able to access Marin’s data, including Gall’s file.”

 

I nodded. This was getting exciting. “So you’d need to snatch one of Marin’s avatars.”

 

Marko was pacing so fast, tight little bustles back and forth. The fabric of his suit made a distinct dry sound every time his legs scissored. “You’d need to have full physical access to it for some time. I’ve never seen a spec for the avatars, so who knows what kind of fireworks would be waiting for you—it’s quite possible—strike that! It’s almost
certain
that taking an avatar off-line would cause a panic response, most likely a complete data dump into the pipe and a hard wipe of the memory, probably triggering a scratch and shuffle of the handshake keys. So the chances of being able to put this plan into effect are slim.”

 

“I assume every Marin avatar has a security retinue?”

 

Krasa nodded, staring at the thick blue smoke of her cigarette. “Like each and every one was the Emperor himself.”

 

I turned to look at Marko and tried the grin again. It flashed onto my numb face, trained and compliant. “To get close to Marin you don’t need a hacker, Marko. You need a
Gunner.
”

 

He stared at me for a moment and then strode forward so quickly my alarms almost went off. Stopping myself from hurting the Techie, I let him lean down into my airspace, all that heroic hair rippling in the scrubbed air of the Blank Room like grass in a wind. “You’re in for this? Three-fourths of the SSF are avatars by now, more every day. I have one, maybe two people in my department I can trust. Marin’s security is going to be
heavy,
and I doubt Ruberto can get you any help here.”

 

I nodded. “We don’t need to do it
here,
” I reminded him. “There are fucking Marins everywhere, all over the System. Open a drawer and a dozen spill out.”

 

I should have been thrilled—my heart should have been pounding, my skin electric—this was the ultimate cop kill, this was the King Worm himself. This was what I’d wanted all those years ago, panting outside of Westminster Abbey. This was my revenge—this was bringing the whole damn poisoned System down, and I’d just talked myself into believing it was possible. Get to Gall. Map the security. Find the weak spot and tear it all down. Why not? But I felt nothing. I was calm; I was dry as paper.

 

Marko started nodding, and it was like his head couldn’t stop. “Okay.” He looked at Krasa. “What do you think, Captain?”

 

Krasa looked at me for a moment like I was an interesting equation Marko was forcing her to appreciate. She sucked in smoke with a squint and then shrugged. “What the fuck,” she said, smoke dribbling from her lips limply.

 

This was not exactly the inspirational speech Marko had been hoping for, but he nodded as robustly as he could. “Right.”

 

I stood up, pulling my Roon from its holster and checking the chamber. “Okay—so where do we get this Miles Amblen–level Techie, Mr. Marko, since you’re apparently not the right man for the job?”

 

He blinked. And then he smiled. His smile was awful—yellow teeth, one broken, and angry red gums. “Well, why not make it Miles Amblen himself? We’ve got him downstairs in the lab, in a drawer somewhere.”

 

 

 

 

XII

SOME MIRACLE OF SHITHEAD PHYSICS

 

 

 

 

I heard her approaching my bunk—her steps light but with no real effort at concealment. I came fully awake and opened my eyes, finding Marlena crouching down so her face was on level with mine, her inked-up skin kind of frightening in the sapping moonlight. We stared at each other comfortably for a moment. It was a relatively cool night, hinting that maybe it wasn’t always broiling in the desert, that maybe, if we lived that long, we might even see a time when you didn’t contemplate suicide every time you took three steps.

 

Chances were slim we’d last that long.

 

“You up?” Skinner finally said.

 

“No, this is a dream,” I said. “You here to seduce me?” The moonlight softened her face a little. I wondered when I’d decided I trusted her enough to let her sneak up on me at night. I tabled the thought for future contemplation. Marlena was easy to talk to, and so far she hadn’t fucked with me. That was enough, for now.

 

A faint smile eased her face a little. “Not this time,” she said. “The little man’s holding a meeting.”

 

I raised my eyebrows. “Now? Fucking hell.”

 

The little man was special, that was for sure. Michaleen was setting a record every day he remained walking around—he wouldn’t say how long he’d been interred, but my best guess from the scraps of evidence I’d been able to gather was several months. I’d asked him how he’d avoided being disappeared like everyone else, and he’d just winked, saying that he knew when to stand still and make like a rock. Whatever the fuck that meant. The average for those of us without mystical rock-making powers seemed closer to three or four weeks, tops.