This Alien Shore (28 page)

F
INAL REPORT ON THE DEATH OF BENT HARRINGTON, the paper said.

It was real paper, the plastic stuff. You could hold it in your hand, stick it in a pocket, pass it along to someone without need for 'netting. Clearly the station authorities were trying for class, or ... something. Phoenix preferred the confines of his own brain for reading, but what the hell. Someone, somewhere, had decided that a piece of paper was more compassionate, and had sent out the notice that way. Maybe Torch's family would take comfort from it.

PROBABLE CAUSE OF DEATH: WELLSEEKER MALFUNCTION.

PROBABLE CAUSE OF WELLSEEKER MALFUNCTION : SOFTWARE INFECTION.

ILLEGAL MODIFICATIONS TO THE VICTIM'S BRAINWARE MAKES FURTHER ANALYSIS UNAD-VISABLE. FAMILY SHOULD NOTIFY STATION FORENSIC LAB WITHIN 24 HOURS IF THEY PLAN TO ARRANGE FOR PRIVATE AUTOPSY.

BE FOREWARNED THAT ANYONE HIRED FOR SOFTWARE AUTOPSY MUST BE WARNED OF THE PRESENCE OF ILLEGAL MODIFICATIONS IN THIS SUBJECT, AS PER STATION CODE 3410-97-9E. FAILURE TO DO SO WILL RESULT IN FINES AND/OR IMPRISONMENT.

Software infection. Wellseeker malfunction.

He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, a cold and clammy and downright ominous sensation. Because they'd been screwing around with a major software virus right before Torch went down. It was something Chaos had found on the outernet, massive and complicated and as intelligent as a virus could get. Awesome stuff. She'd looked at it too closely herself, and gotten fried. Poor Chaos. She was good at what she did, but she was never very careful; she relied on intuition to decide when to take precautions and when not ... and this time, apparently, it had failed her.

They'd posted her death notice on the moddie networks, and a thousand faceless friends from throughout the outerworlds had sent in obits or roasts or whatever to commemorate her brief life. She'd become well loved among them, as befit someone who once made all the Hellsgate Pol computers churn out yellow smiley faces whenever they were asked for mug shots. Man, that was a classic. The best part was that she'd once slept with this guy who worked for the Pol there, some ex-hacker they'd later bribed into doing data security, and she probably could have gotten him to just give her safe access to the system, if she'd wanted it ... only she didn't. She wanted to do it the hard way. Which was why they all loved her like they did.

So the death notice had gone out and the responses came in, and along with all the notes of grieving and sympathy came an odd little packet from Lisalia. Seems the crowd there had picked up a few samples of a nasty little virus, and it looked very much like what she had been playing with. It took Phoenix's crowd a week to yank its teeth so they could even copy it without getting burned, but at last they had a copy they could take a close look at, safely. Sure enough, it matched up with the one she'd inloaded, at least in the parts that mattered. This was Chaos' killer.

He was willing to bet that's what Torch had been working on, too. Maybe all its teeth weren't out, after all. Maybe it was nasty enough to grow new ones. He could feel a cold knot of hate growing in the pit of his stomach, a kind of hate he'd never felt before. If this was what had taken Torch down ... then there would be vengeance. One moddie death might be an accident—
maybe
—but two meant that someone or something was targeting their kind. And that would not be tolerated.

Was it possible the government was conspiring to take the moddies out? Torch had thought so. It was no secret that the augmented hackers were a thorn in everyone's side, from the loftiest Guild authority down to the lowliest shipping clerk. Everybody'd been hit at one time or another, be it with a playful infection that translated all their private documents into Pig Latin, or a subtle, insidious mole that ground government functioning to a halt when it finally broke out. When you had a central processing system to which everyone and their mother were plugged in, such pranks were inevitable. The majority of problems were caused by youngsters who really didn't know what they were doing, of course, out to prove their fledgling manhood by screwing with other people's data; they generally got caught, and their wrists were heavily slapped by the Powers That Be. Most quit the game at that point. Those that didn't tried again, and tried harder, and in the end they got good enough not to get caught any more. Which was a good thing, 'cause that kind of behavior could get you put away for life. Which is why Phoenix was damned glad that Torch had fixed his own files, the one time the pols had picked him up. If they'd ever figured out just how much havoc he was personally responsible for, the goons would have canned him, for sure.

So maybe this virus was somebody's way of getting back at them. Maybe somebody got hit by an electronic prank and didn't appreciate it for the art form it was, and decided to exact his own revenge. Torch had always believed that the virus which took out Chaos was a government plot, a way of dealing with hackers through their own choice medium. What if he'd been right?

Then there will be hell to pay,
Phoenix swore silently.

There was a code of behavior common to all hackers: unwritten, unspoken, but absolute. You didn't hurt people. Their businesses were fair game, their possessions, and even their governments—but not people. You might shut down the whole Paradise shipping ring just to watch the state of electronic panic which ensued, but you didn't screw with a med center. You might target a politician known for anti-mod campaigning, and add a few thousand live-sex calls to his vid bill (alerting the press, of course), but you didn't do that to a politico on whose reputation some disaster relief bill was riding. You might even rig a bank executive's account so that when he woke up one day he discovered that every cent he possessed had been donated to the Friends of Earth, or some other such fringe group. But you never, ever, took money that was needed to feed a hungry child, or purchase medication, or otherwise save a human life. That just wasn't done. And likewise the government's attempts to crack down on the hackers—an effort that went on constantly, with notably little success—always fell short of the ultimate penalty. It was an unspoken agreement, to which both sides had adhered since the beginning of electronic time. Thou shalt not kill.

Until now.

He stared at the thing on his monitor, hating it, loving it, needing to dissect it in that primal way that animals need food and water. He hated working on a monitor, but he sure as hell wasn't going to load the damn thing into his head. Had Torch done that, had Chaos? It was always tempting. You could manipulate code much better internally than you could through a stone-age mechanism like this. Had Phoenix's packmates gotten frustrated one day, decided they could handle the consequences, and let the monster in? Modware was notoriously sensitive to such assaults, it lacked the kind of safeguards that came with legal implants. That's what you got when you added to a system piece by piece, rather than planning it out from the start. Had they figured they could handle it, neutered the virus and then inloaded it only to find out that it hadn't been neutered at all?

He was going to find out. He was going to take this sucker apart bit by bit if he had to, squeeze it until its secrets ran out like blood, and find out where the hell it had come from. And God help the feds, if they were behind this thing. Or the politicos. Or ... whoever.

The full destructive potential of Phoenix and his kind hadn't been unleashed for generations, not since the terrorist hacking of the third new century. God help the deadheads if they had forgotten their history lessons, and thought that people like him would sit back and submit to their petty extermination efforts. Did they really believe the moddies would die off one by one in silence, never asking who their enemy was, never striking back?

Fat fucking chance. If the hackers went down, they'd take the outworlds with them. Anyone who thought it couldn't be done needed to go back and run their history chips again.

T
HE PRIMA knocked when she reached Devlin's office. She didn't have to (and with some subordinates never did, it kept them on their toes that way) but Devlin's rank deserved the courtesy.

“Come in.”

The door slid open in response to his words. When she entered, it slid shut behind her, leaving her in near-darkness. Most of the room was taken up by a holographic display, some bizarre kind of star map that provided the only light in the room. She recognized the icons representing Earth and Guera at opposite ends of the holo, with a fine webwork of glimmering lines connecting them to the three or four dozen stations between them. It was a large display, the kind you could walk through to get a better perspective, and Devlin was in the center of it. His vision was focused on a pattern of fine white lines so thickly gathered about one point that they looked like a mass of tangled silk. He looked up and saw her then, and the pleasure on his face that it was her and not some annoying subordinate was unmistakable. “Lights to half,” he said aloud, and the room went from dark to semi-lit. He was smiling as he walked toward her, the holo patterning his body as he moved, but she could see from his tightly knit brow and the tension of his shoulders that he had been stressed, was stressed now, and would remain stressed for some time to come.

“Working, I see.”

“Always.”

The display looked chaotic to her, but of course it wasn't. Nothing he did was ever chaotic. “What is it?”

“Patterns of communication. Compliments of your loving and loyal subjects, whose only purpose is to serve you.” His tone was dry. He reached into the display and pointed to one of the most active icons. “Delhi.” Then another, linked to it by a number of bright lines. “Kent.” And another, some distance away. “Varsav.” And on Paradise, “Ra.”

“You're monitoring them.”

He smiled darkly. “Of course. Didn't you tell us that even our own people were suspect? I'm watching them now, as I'm sure they're watching me.”

“Perhaps if they had the technology they would,” she said, smiling slightly. “As it is, I think you have a slight advantage in that arena.”

He didn't smile outright, but the comment clearly pleased him. “That's as it should be, don't you think? God help this office, the day your Guildmasters know
all
my tricks.” He looked back at the display once more. “Still, Delhi has some hackers I'd like not to duel with, and Varsav's security is downright Moebian in logic. Or so I've heard,” he added quickly.

She took a few steps closer to the display and studied it herself. From here she could see that the seemingly empty space between station icons was webbed with even more delicate lines, each of them pulsing with its own secret rhythm. She knew that the thickness of each would have meaning to Devlin, as would its luminosity, its rhythm, and its duration. Another programmer might have rendered the same data in a list of numbers, or some other more prosaic form. Devlin preferred a more abstract format, that hinted at complexities no mere list of figures could capture. That was his strength, and the facet of his intelligence which had allowed him to rise above all his would-be rivals. She couldn't always understand what he was doing ... but could she have relied upon any programmer whose work was fully comprehensible to her? He was a programmer; she wasn't. She expected mysteries.