This Alien Shore (44 page)

So far, so good.

A pair of women passed by her wearing nothing but body-suits, one painted with swirls of rainbow colors and the other covered with vast, staring eyes. Someone else wore a head-dress of synthetic feathers (now
those
must have cost a small fortune), that cascaded down around her shoulders and breasts and offered minimal compliance with decency laws. Something with six breasts held hands with a nine-foot-tall creature who had something alive wrapped around his loins—she didn't look too closely at that—and a crowd of tiny Variant women, no taller than her waist, ran down the corridor with a bouncing step that set their crystalline headsets jingling. All in all it was a crowd of humanity and unhumanity that made Reijik Station look downright empty by contrast, and all of it was colorful and bright and visually audacious. Including her.

Then she turned a comer and saw Allo.

She almost stopped walking—almost turned back the way she'd come—but no, they'd be looking for such a pattern of movement. And there was no telling who was behind her now, watching for it. With pounding heart she moved into the crowd heading toward him, wondering just how good her disguise was. It wouldn't pass close inspection, she knew that, she'd just hoped it would buy her time while she lost herself in the crowd. She paused at a display of food items, tried to look hungry, and then turned away from him as if to inspect its wares. She had bet everything on the fact that they wouldn't assume her to have managed such a complete change of look so quickly; if they did, and were looking closely at the faces that passed them, this outfit wouldn't help her at all.

Shifting her weight from leg to leg, she leaned over slightly at the waist to peruse something on a lower shelf. Her skirt didn't have a lot of clearance for that kind of maneuver, and she knew it. She sensed a couple of tourists stopping behind her, heard their smiling whispers. Men. They were so funny, so predictable. They could pass by a dozen nudes and not pay attention to one, but hit them with a piece of clothing that
might
slip out of place and their eyes became riveted. It must be some evolutionary thing, survival of the fittest and all that; maybe from the days when a woman in a fur sarong
might
have been hiding an extra banana or two beneath her wrap, whereas a nude offered no food at all. She giggled to herself and leaned down a little lower, enjoying the game. Too bad she couldn't really buy food, but the water had taken up the last of her cash, and she could hardly use her debit chip now. Or her headset. Or anything, in fact, but her brain.

After some time had passed, she turned away with a sigh—
not hungry after all
—and glanced surreptitiously at where Allo had stood. He was gone. The knot that had been forming in her chest started to unwind, and she had to remind herself,
Be careful. He may still be around here somewhere.
But it was a good omen, at least. Sometimes you needed omens.

She walked. Far, far, following instructions whispered to her by Raven, confirmed by consensus of all the Others. Walked with a swinging gait that spoke of sex and leisure and wealth and said nothing of fear and flight. Men smiled at her as she passed. Some women, also, and a few creatures whose sex she wasn't too sure of. She smiled back at all of them.
A creature of pleasure am I, inhabitant of this lovely station, addicted to its many delights.
Three corridors became five, became ten, and at last she began to relax. They couldn't have followed her this far. They couldn't get help from the authorities either, no matter what story they came up with to explain themselves, because their own business was so suspect they just couldn't risk the contact.

At last she took a side corridor to where the flyways were anchored. It was going to be a hell of a flight in this outfit, but that couldn't be helped; she could hardly change clothes here. She kicked her shoes off so at least she could get some traction if she needed it, then ducked into the circular portal and gave herself a good shove to start. It was a public flyway, wide enough for a dozen support lines in each direction, and travelers grinned or smirked or shook their heads at her as she went by. Well, that's what happened when you wore G-dependent clothing in a free zone; she hoped they enjoyed the show. She rather enjoyed the shock on their faces herself, and was willing to bet that if questioned later, they, too, would not remember what her face looked like. Oh, had she worn scarlet underwear? That must have been a mistake, how could she choose anything so bright ... ?

The flyway brought her to an inner ring, from which point a free tube took her down to the station itself. Raven had all the maps of Paradise organized for this journey, and she brought them up one by one into Katlyn's field of vision as she walked. God, but she was tired; the journey, the tension, and the pressure of the heeled shoes were bleeding all the strength from her body. She was hungry, too, and wished she could afford food. The tube let her off in a mall that was ringed with delicacies, but no cash meant no food. At least until her financial problems were dealt with.

For a moment she just stood in the middle of the mall, hardly able to absorb all that had happened to her. People rushed by on every side of her: adults, children, humans. Variants. All going somewhere, all doing something. She should have been overwhelmed by the chaos of it all, but she wasn't. She was overwhelmed by something else.

She had
made
it.

Her enemies were behind her. They didn't know where she was. If she'd played her cards right, then even the Guild didn't know where she was ... thanks in part to Allo and his crew. God alone knew why the Guerans wanted her so badly, but for the time being she didn't have to find out. She had lost herself in a crowd of millions, and if she was careful enough they'd never pick up her trail again.

All right, so she didn't have food or friends, money, shelter, or any of the other hundred-and-some-odd things you needed to get along. But those could be acquired, in time. Safety couldn't. Safety was a prerequisite to all other achievements.

And she had managed that.

Tired, hungry, she asked Raven for the map for the next phase of her journey and started walking. It was only four miles on foot to the place she needed, and that was a distance she could manage. When she got out of the shopping district, she'd change her shoes to make walking easier, and after that she should be all right. The hi-G of the station proper was hard on five-inch heels.

Safe. She was safe. The word had a strange taste in her mouth, as she whispered it aloud to make it seem more real. She was safe, and in control, and for the first time since leaving the metroliner she actually thought she might manage to get through all this somehow. It was a new feeling, and a strangely refreshing one. Hopefully, if she nurtured it right, it would endure.

With a sigh of resignation—and a faint growl of hunger in her stomach-she began to walk toward the less prosperous districts.

S
LEEP. PHOENIX vaguely remembered it. That was something you did when you didn't have a virus dancing inside your head, right? Something you did when there was no pressing business.

If such a time had ever existed. If it ever would again.

He was obsessed, but that was okay. There was a gene for obsession, and all the hackers had it. He could measure his own by the crumpled packages of instant food that littered the floor around his workbench. Wrappers from Energee! bars, shredded envelopes of Lo-Munch, boxes of some god-forsaken soft drink that he was currently addicted to, the straws sticking out like Veridian eye stalks. He couldn't remember eating any of it, but that was normal for him. Food was fuel, nothing more, and at times like this he paid no more attention to it than you would pay to the compressed fuel you put into your pod.

The virus was all.

He could see why Chaos had been obsessed with it. He could even see why she had let it into her head, and Torch also. It was just that good. Sometimes he would reach out with his hand to the monitor as if he could touch the thing, wanting to run his virtual fingers across its surface, hungering to fold it and turn it and manipulate it as only the mind's eye could do, to see what made it tick. But that was suicide, plain and simple. He'd already sent out a warning to the other stations about what this thing could do, and how they should never,
ever,
let their people inload it. How could he make the very same mistake he was warning them against?

But he wanted to. He wanted to so badly.

With a sigh he reached out for the nearest drink box, cursing softly when he found it to be empty. At times like this he resented the five steps between his workbench and the chiller. He picked up another one from the shelf over his desk and forced himself to move, cramped muscles emphatic in their protest as he crossed the small room and opened the chiller door. Five seconds was all it would take to make the stuff palatable, so he set the chiller for that, put the drink box inside, and let it do its stuff. Five seconds. You could skip a message to Hellsgate in that much time. You could push the button that set off a cascade of destructive programs and watch their effect. You could feel the bite of a foreign virus in your head and know yourself doomed, you could feel the panic rising as your brain shut down, bit by bit, and have time to imagine what the end result would be....

Five seconds was a long time, in his world. He hated to waste it.

He shook the box when it came out of the chiller, to even the temperature, and then pierced it and took a deep drink. The contents were a sugar-and-stim mix, disguised with a little food coloring and a dollop of some weird synthetic flavor. The taste wasn't a thrill, but the coldness of it chilled his tongue as it went down, and it felt good. He drank it all, then crushed the box in his hand and threw it toward the recycler. It missed. No surprise there. His attention was already on the monitor once more, and the monster that lurked behind it. Perhaps if this time he tried one of Chaos' testing sequences ...

The pattern that was on his monitor suddenly disappeared and a square of white light took its place.

He stared at it for a few seconds, waiting for it to resolve itself. When you processed as much illegal shit as he did, sometimes glitches just happened. He even hit the side of the monitor once, in a strategy as old as mankind himself, to see if that would clear the problem.

No dice.

With a muttered curse he flashed his brainware an instruction to come online again, and started feeding it the control codes that would reclaim his system. Someone was screwing with his stuff, that was clear, and it had damn well better not be one of his own people. Or rather, he thought grimly, it had better be one of his own people, because if this was some stranger fucking with his system, he'd better kiss his own 'ware good-bye right now—

Numbers appeared in the center of the screen. 10 first, then 9, then 8 ... the pattern was clear. He watched the countdown with a mixture of annoyance and real frustration. Goddam whoever was pulling this shit, if he actually screwed up any of Phoenix's work. The only thing worse than a war between hackers and the government was a sniping vendetta between hackers themselves.

Then: 0. The dot exploded into a circle of black smoke, which in turn became a rising column, which in turn became capped with a thick mushroom head that spread across his screen—

—which answered the question about who it was, anyway.

He flashed up the icons needed to send a message to him. FUCK YOU, MAN.

The mushroom cloud faded from his screen and block letters appeared instead. IS THIS A MONITOR I SEE? WHATCHA, PROGRAMMING FOR DINOSAURS NEXT?

He flashed back: JUST SENDING OUT VIRUSES TO GUYS WHO PISS ME OFF.

OOOOH, I AM SOOOO SCAAAAARED.

Despite himself, he smiled. It was hard, really hard to hate Nuke. The guy was an irritant extraordinaire, but so was half of Phoenix's crowd. It came with the territory. Still, he really did want to get back to that virus, and he wasn't all that comfortable with having someone else access his system while it was in there.

IS THERE A POINT TO THIS?

POINT? UH. YEAH. POINT ... A frowning face appeared on the screen. I THINK SO....