This Alien Shore (18 page)

“Let's see where she goes,” he said at last. “Let's see who comes after her.” He refolded the letter and tucked it away inside his robe once more. “Let's see if her knowledge increases.”

“You'll warn the outship?”

He shut his eyes for barely an instant, flashing the icons that would link him to that ship. Thoughts became binary code became a signal beam ... several seconds to span the space between where his signal began and where it would be answered. Several seconds more for the answer to get to him.

“It's done,” he said. And he took up his place before the inner door once more. “They'll take care of it.”

The door whisked open. A young man was waiting, baggage in hand.

I
N THE WEB the spider waited: centered, silent. Crystalline strands stretched out from beneath her feet to node, station, outship and beyond. A thousand strands as fine as thought, to bind the human worlds together. They shivered now and then, as one event or another altered the tenuous balance of human power, and the creature at the heart of the web shifted her attention accordingly. Slender fingers stroking the web with loving care, coaxing maximum data from each frail vibration.

There were thick strands for each of the Guild stations, paths of shimmering data whose far ends lodged in the souls of the Guildmasters. Those were the most important strands, the armature of the entire structure. If Hsing so much as twitched in his golden palace, the spider knew it. If Ra took a lover who might prove her weakness, the news was carried along that slender thread, until it came within the spider's reach. If Kent or Varsav so much as drew a breath that might prove relevant, by darkshift the spider was tasting his exhalation. There were other strands that led to other Guildmasters as well, twenty of her strongest lines and over two hundred of lesser strength, but those were the four that mattered right now. Those were the four whom the Prima, in her wisdom, had declared the spider's rivals.

Hsing. Ra. Varsav. Kent.

They were not rivals for power, not in the traditional sense. Chandras Delhi had already reached the highest station that any human—save the Prima herself—might attain. Yet power might be lost. Only two hundred and twenty nodes existed in outspace, each with its resident Guildmaster. It wasn't a large number, when one considered the thousands of Guildfolk who fought for such an appointment, and those just beneath her were constantly seeking the chink in her armor that would allow them to unseat her. As for the other Guildmasters ... they always bore watching. Her station at Serpent's Reach was a plum assignment, situated at the midpoint of several major trade routes, and she knew the others coveted it. She could taste how badly they wanted it, knew in her soul that a single mistake—even a fleeting moment of weakness—might find her rendering up her passcodes to a stranger, so that another might move in.

Hsing, Varsov, Kent, Ra. They all had stations of their own; not the equal of hers perhaps, but valuable in their own right. So there would be no competition from that end. Indeed, they probably expended as much energy guarding their own positions as she did with her own. Ra was not someone she feared; the woman was shallow, obsessed with her own pleasures, and was unlikely to be involved in the kind of political intrigue that Delhi and the others thrived on. Delhi kept a watchful eye on Ra's affairs, but expected no surprises. Kent had been a shell of a man since his accident, but a keen wit still lay coiled within that tormented soul, and people who underestimated him did so at their own risk. She did not intend to. Varsav ... that man was a lit fuse, and there was no telling what might set him off, but he was a brilliant strategist, and his attention to detail made him doubly dangerous. People like that sometimes sensed the webwork in which she had bound them, and if they struggled hard enough and long enough they could damage the delicate strands of data which she used to control them. As for Hsing ... the man was a capable adversary, and normally she watched him closely, but he had been away from his station for a year now. By the time he returned, there would be a dozen underlings vying for his seat, each with his own private plot to steal the mastership. It would take all his energy to consolidate his position and undo what damage those absent months had fostered. So she did not fear Hsing. Not yet.

Did they fear her?

She knew that Kent did. Kent was a creature of fear, and even the flood of chemicals in his bloodstream—she had a full accounting of it, the gem of her secret intelligence—could not negate the emotion entirely. She knew that his own dark senses had tested the borders of her domain, and she had not turned away all his efforts. Better to know where the enemy was, and feed him the data you wanted him to have, then to send him back into the nameless darkness to plan a better assault. Because the next one you might not catch....

Her brainware flashed an alert: incoming shipment. She signaled it to go ahead and let the symbols of its efforts scroll upward in her field of vision. It was a data capsule, hijacked from Reijik Station. She keyed it to open, took a brief look at the coded contents, and then shunted it over to her decryption experts. She noted the cost of transmission—not cheap, but then, hijacked data never was—and flashed an icon to confirm that payment would be made. It wasn't necessary for her to visualize instructions to have her account debited the proper amount, or to see that it was forwarded to the proper agent. Nor was it necessary for her to oversee the process which disguised the payment as something else, so that an unexpected audit would not reveal illicit business. All of that was automatic, programmed deep into the recesses of her brainware and the living cells that surrounded it. Such methods were as much a part of her as breathing.

With a sigh of satisfaction she flashed a series of icons to her brainware, and the plasteel cage that supported her body began to move. She could have had her brain repaired long ago so that her body moved of its own accord, without the need for mechanical support, but there was risk in that; the same techniques which would reroute the neural pathways in search of more efficient cellular combinations might also do damage to the delicate systems she relied upon for thought. A woman from some other planet might have risked that, preferring to sacrifice a few fleeting thoughts rather than spend her life encased in this mechanized carapace, but no Gueran ever would. The legacy of Guera was in the minds and souls of her people, and like all her people, Chandras Delhi revered the human brain in its natural form. If the cost was to her body, so be it; she was a creature of mind, not flesh, and would willingly bear the sacrifice.

Reijik Station,
she thought. That was one of the nodes that served the motherworld, Earth. There were some on her staff who felt she was mad to focus as much energy as she did on that forgotten planet, but that was because they didn't see the universe as she did. Earth was so finely wrapped in datalines that it appeared as a white cocoon to her inner senses: a network so closely tangled that only rarely did an outsider manage to pull loose a thread and examine it. Few bothered to try. To most Guerans, Earth was a waste of space and history, too tied up in its own internal politics to ever become meaningful in the larger sense. Those Guerans who did pay attention to their evolutionary motherworld generally did so with resentment. Earth was, after all, the homeworld of nine billion “true” humans, and the focal point of five billion more. Or so they called themselves. Humans whose ancestors had stayed at home while the colonists of Guera and Yin and Frisia went forth to claim the galaxy ... and now they dared to feel superior to their Hausman cousins, and to flaunt that superiority at every turn.

In truth, Delhi mused, if Earth had been closer to an ainniq, there would probably have been war long ago. The Variant worlds were united in very little, but their hatred of Earth was a rallying point. Shortsighted fools. Just as the primordial melange of Earth's ancient oceans had once provided nature with the raw materials for life, so would its crowded datasphere now provide the spawning ground for new forms of technology, new gems of data, new dangers ... she was alone in feeling that Earth had such promise, but that didn't bother her. Few watched the human homeworld as she did, which meant there were fewer rivals for her harvests. Her predations.

Reijik Station,
she mused. Her fingers twitched in their plasteel cage as she wondered what manner of feast this harvest might provide.

“D
amn it to hell,” Stivan cursed.

His coworker looked up from the control panel where his own attentions were focused. “What's that, Stiv?”

“Nothing.” His voice was a growl. “Nothing at all.”

Line after line of code scrolled up on the monitor. You had to look at hijacked material like that—on a monitor—and you had to shut your brainware down, too, because you never knew when there was some kind of security virus embedded in that mess that would fry your circuitry as soon as it got into your head. Okay, so that was the job. He understood it, and accepted the whole thing. But this shit was encrypted out the wazoo. His decryption programs were sending him signals he had never seen before, and the only references he had on such things were in his own head.

“Shit.” He struck the control panel in frustration and at last turned away from the monitor. One deep breath. Two. Take it in, hold it for a six-count, let it out. He'd made enough mistakes when his temper was short that he'd finally programmed his brainware not to accept the start-up icon unless he was calm—which was fine in theory, but a royal pain in the ass when he needed access to something quickly. Like now.

At last he guessed that he had reached the point where his internal monitors would be satisfied with the key readings—pulse rate, blood pressure, skin conductivity—and he envisioned the start-up icon. It was a red dragon on a black background, very dramatic. He had based it upon a tattoo he had once seen as a child, that had stuck in his mind ever since. It was complex and hard to envision properly—he'd programmed his head so that any line more than a nano out of place would cause the whole icon to fail—but that was for security. Stivan Dici was obsessed with security. Little wonder, since his primary job was to break down the security of other systems.

It took him three tries—apparently his blood pressure was still a bit too high, and he had to wait it out—but at last he was back in operation. The decryption data was in part of his permanent storage array, nestled against the inside of his ventricular wall. The information took up a large chunk of his permanent memory, but it was well worth the sacrifice. What was he going to do with his brainware otherwise, store viddies for replay?