WebMage (2 page)

Boy, had I ever. "Shit," I mumbled. The face that stared back at me was not one I could wear around here. I invoked the spell that rounded my slightly pointed ears and reshaped the vertical slits in my green eyes to more human circles. My long, black hair, fine bone structure, and dead white skin I left intact. On a campus with as large a Goth population as the U of M, they were normal enough to make concealing them a waste of magical resources, a cardinal sin in House Lachesis. That done, the transformation was complete. Prince Ravirn, of the House of Lachesis, sixty-seventh in line for the throne, was gone. In his place was Ravi Latcher, a junior in Classics and Computer Science with midterms coming up.

Atropos and her spell would have to wait. I'd given Lachesis my solemn word that I wouldn't miss another midterm. And breaking a promise to Fate is an excellent way to end up as the subject of a Greek tragedy, even if you are a member of the family. I assuaged my conscience with the thought that Atropos hadn't been able to make the spell work yet. Otherwise, she would never have come to me. I'd have another go at finding it after my first test. Not enough to make me feel better, but the best I could do for the moment.

Swearing under my breath, I turned and started stuffing books into my shoulder bag. That's when I remembered the spear. Ran into it is more like the truth, but that's neither here nor there.

Damn! If Rod found that thing there, I'd never hear the end of it. Pulling the weapon loose, I tossed it under the bed. That left a rip in the poster and a hole in the wall. It seemed an awfully trivial concern just then, but anyone who's ever had a touchy roommate would understand. Sighing, I flipped the cover of the laptop up and hit the space bar.

Enter password.

Correct.

Run Melchior. Execute.

I hear and obey!

The laptop shifted back to its webgoblin form. "What now? I didn't even have all my bootables in the right places. You know I hate that."

He can get in a real snit when that happens, and I didn't feel like picking a fight with my laptop three days before term papers were due. He could crash at the most inconvenient times when he was angry.

"I know, I know. I'm really sorry. You've been doing good work lately, and I haven't been praising you enough. But I was supposed to meet my study group in Walter Library ten minutes ago. I want you to fix Rod's poster, then catch up to me there."

"I don't see why you can't just do it yourself."

"Because I don't have time to code a real spell, and if I just paste an illusion over it, I'll forget about it. Then the illusion will wear off at the most inconvenient possible time, and I'll end up having a huge argument with Rod."

"True. Pathetic, but true." I let that slide, and he continued, "Get moving, I'll be along in fifteen minutes or so."

"Great." I opened the door, then looked over my shoulder. "Oh, and Melchior."

"Yes?"

"I don't want you terrorizing the sorority girls on your way over."

"But—!"

"No, Mel. Stay away from the football team too, OK?"

"Yeah, sure. If I have to leave the Greeks alone, I might as well not have any fun."

"Thanks, Mel. You're a prince."

"No, you're the prince. I'm just a lowly goblin flunky, doomed to a life of menial labor." Melchior wrenched a razor-sharp tooth from his mouth and spat a netspider into his hand. He squeezed it until silk came out, then threaded it onto the tooth. "No one appreciates my simple graces."

"Good-bye, Mel."

As Melchior began to sew up the rip in the poster, I ducked out and closed the door. Then I took the back stairs three at a time. When I hit the campus mall, I sprinted. The mall was lined with vaguely classical buildings. My family's early-Greek worshippers would have recognized the style, though they'd have wondered why everything was oversized and rendered in stark gray granite or boring beige sandstone. It was October, one of the good ones, and the air was crisp but not icy. In the clear fall air the full moon seemed close enough to touch, and the smells of dry leaves and dying grass were enough to paint a grin on my lips. There was nothing like fall in Minnesota. Even with the threat of Atropos's spell hanging over everything.

Melchior caught me as I was dashing up the library steps. Somehow, he'd gotten there ahead of me.

"Boss!" he whispered loudly from behind a pillar. "Hey, Boss."

I turned, startled. He'd gotten there too fast. "How'd you manage to fix the poster so quickly?" I looked around to make sure that none of the local human population was close enough to see me talking to a mythical creature. Together we slid into the deep shadows at the edge of the building.

"I didn't fix the poster," said Melchior. He raised a closed hand to forestall my complaint. "We have much bigger problems than an annoyed roommate. This came through into the room after you left."

He opened the hand. In it was a small, broken thing, a netspider. I took it and popped it into my mouth. The flavor was even worse than the ones my grandmother had coded. It was also familiar.

"Atropos," I whispered. I was stunned. I'd been very careful not to leave any identifying marks, and I didn't think anything could have backtracked me. "This came from my cousins, or worse, my great-aunt. Are you jamming?"

"As much as possible, but they're using some pretty heavy code-breaking algorithms. Their webhounds will have us locked down within ten minutes."

"I guess I'm going to have to take a pass on my study night," I said. "Melchior, Bugout. Execute."

"Executing," said the goblin. "Waiting for connection." There was a long pause. "Lachesis.web system connect denied."

"What?"

"Melchior is unable to create an mweb socket connection," he said. "The system may be down or there may be insufficient system resources at this time. Try again later."

We were being counterjammed. That was very bad. It meant they had me at least partially localized. It also meant Atropos was directly involved. It would take her authority to seal access to a whole node or band of nodes. If she knew it was me…

"Right. Melchior, Sidedoor. Execute." The goblin's eyes glazed over and a low hum emerged from his mouth. After a moment he spoke again. "Unable to open carrier wave connection. Access denied." In a more normal voice, he continued, "Sorry, Boss. It doesn't look good. I can't get in anywhere, and we only have about five more minutes."

"All right. We'll have to take this to extremes. Melchior, Scorched Earth. Execute." His eyes got very wide, and he looked like he wanted to object, but I had phrased it as a direct order.

"Loading."

There was a long pause as Melchior prepped the spell. It was too big to keep in active memory. I had time to wonder if I was going too far. Melchior's voice came again.

"Executing."

No time for second thoughts. Scorched Earth is not a spell that can be aborted halfway. Ultimately, all spells draw power from the same source, the primal chaos that churns between the worlds. But my family mostly uses the predigested forces my grandmother and her sisters channel into the net via their mainframe webservers. Scorched Earth isn't like that. It taps directly into the interworld chaos. That means it's both very dangerous and very powerful. It also means I don't have to have web access to run it. Melchior's voice interrupted my train of thought.

"Scorched Earth successfully implemented," he said.

With those simple words, the nastiest virus I had yet coded was released into the mweb. If it worked, it would scramble the routers for my whole node band and put my great-aunt's webhounds smack in the middle of a data storm. There was no way they'd be able to track me through that. There was even a chance of completely fragging them.

"Uh, Boss," said Melchior.

"Yes. What is it, Mel."

"I just lost contact with the carrier wave."

"I thought you couldn't get in."

"I couldn't, but that's not what I meant. I mean it just cut out completely."

"It can't do that, unless…" I trailed off as a really ugly thought occurred to me. I looked at Melchior, and he nodded.

"There's no carrier wave and no mweb line," he said. "I can't even get a ping off the backbone. I think we just took the entire net down, Boss."

"Sweet Necessity," I murmured. "What have I done now?"

* * * *

Sitting at the desk in my dorm, I cradled my head in my hands. Melchior sat on the floor nearby. For four hours we'd been trying to establish some kind of link to the mweb. Nothing worked. There was very little doubt that we'd crashed the whole damn thing. If this was ever traced back to me, I'd have more to worry about than Atropos.

"Well, Mel, I think it's time we admitted—" He held a hand up.

He cocked his long, pointed ears this way and that for a few moments, then got up and walked to the network jack in the wall. Looking confused, he wetted a fingertip and stuck it into the socket. A moment later he let out a prolonged modulated whistle.

"Uh, Boss. I don't know that you're going to believe this, but you've got new mail."

"Over the local net?"

"Yes, indeedy."

"What is it?"

"It's from Cerice. She wants a visual ASAP."

"Over the local line? That's going to lock a lot of folks out of their online services. Where is she mailing from?"

"[email protected] via AOL.com."

"Well, so much for AOL for the next twenty minutes or so. I wonder what she's doing in this DecLocus."

Cerice is even further down Clotho's bloodline than I am Lachesis's, making us something like forty-seventh cousins and barely related, but we're of an age and have been friends since our teens. No one seems to know quite how long the children of Fate might live, but none of the family has yet to die of old age or even to look as though they someday might. If it weren't for a very low birth rate and an actuary's nightmare of violent death—mostly accidental but occasionally with intent—we'd be legion. As it is, there are certainly fewer than five hundred of us and, counting Cerice and me, no more than a dozen under the age of forty. Since I'd thought she was home in Clotho's domain working on a hardware-recycling project she'd been rather intense about of late, finding her here seemed almost too odd.

"Melchior, Vlink; [email protected] via umn.edu to Cerice @shara.gob viaAOL.com. Execute."

"Aye, aye. Searching for shara.gob." I used the brief pause that followed to drop the spell that altered my appearance. "Contact. Waiting for a response from shara.gob. Lock. Annexing extra bandwidth. Vtp linking initiated."

Melchior opened his eyes and mouth wide. Three beams of light—green, blue, and red—shot forth from these orifices intersecting at a point several feet in front of his face. A translucent golden globe appeared at this juncture. It fogged, then filled with the three-dimensional image of a strikingly beautiful young woman. Her hair was so pale as to be almost white. Aside from that, her features bore a strong resemblance to my own, the primary difference being that on her they looked better. She was wearing some sort of formal court gown in a taffeta that seemed to shift from red to gold depending how the light hit it. It was very low cut, but a half jacket prevented it from being indecent.

"Cerice, my darling," I said. "You're as ravishing as ever. It's an absolute pleasure to rest my weary eyes on your delightful features once again." Even under these circumstances I couldn't help but be pleased to see her.

"Charming as always, Ravirn. Your absence must be sorely felt at your grandmother's court."

"Alas, I think not. While Lachesis has some fondness for me, it seems to be in inverse proportion to my proximity. I suspect that my manner charms less than my nature offends."

"Speaking of which," said Cerice, shifting from courtly circumlocution to businesslike directness, "you have a major problem."

"Oh," I replied. The change in gears was jarring.

"Look, I know family politics calls for a lot of polite nonsense and frills before finally broaching the real subject for conversation, but you just don't have the time."

"All right, I'm willing to dispense with formality. I was dying to ask you how you happened to be in this particular DecLocus at this exact moment anyway. I thought you were home."

"I was until twenty minutes ago."

"But—"

She cut me off smoothly. "Yes, I know. The net's down. I hacked into Clotho's mainframe and used it to open a single-use one-way gate."

"That must have been a cast-iron bitch."

She smiled. "It wasn't that bad. You're not the only competent coder in this generation. But I didn't call to exchange hacking tricks. I called to let you know you're in hot water all the way up to your eyeballs."

"How hot?" I asked glumly.

"Atropos wants your head."

Sweat popped out along my brow line. But over an open link I didn't dare talk about what was going on. Also, as much as I liked Cerice, on this topic I didn't dare trust any of Fate's children. Besides, there was no way she'd believe the truth.

"That's not news," I said, leaning back in my chair and trying to look relaxed. "Atropos has always held a special, black little place in her heart for me. It's because of my hacking. She writes lousy security algorithms, then blames me when I demonstrate it to her."

"Ravirn, don't be more of an idiot than usual. We both know she's security-mad. Her firewalls and program killers are better than either Clotho's or Lachesis's. But you're an egotistical bastard, and Atropos is the only opponent you think is worth your effort. Unfortunately, you haven't the wit to crack them without leaving a calling card of some kind so you can gloat about it later."

"Well, yeah, but…" I wanted to defend myself, but the only argument I had was one I couldn't make.

"But me no buts. As I said, you haven't the time. Not after you crashed the whole net. That wasn't smart."

"It wasn't actually my intention."

"Intention or not, that was the result, and it's given Atropos the opportunity she's been waiting for. The net wasn't down five minutes before she showed up at Clotho's demesne. They called council, and when Lachesis arrived, Atropos demanded your head. Lachesis apparently has
some
attachment to you, because she absolutely refused to hear of it. Unfortunately for you, Clotho sided with Atropos." Cerice paused and cocked her head to the side. "Though I think that might have been as much to see how well you operated under the pressure as anything. She seems to have a soft spot for you, though I can't imagine why."