Cybermancy (7 page)

“Sounds good,” said Mort. “It’s going to be ages before we find someone else willing to come down here and play, and it’s not like we ever get time off.”

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “He’s planning something.”

“Of course he’s planning something,” Dave said in exasperation. “You can be such a yap-dog sometimes. I’m all for it.” He turned his gaze on me, and there was a knowing twinkle deep in its black depths. “Still think you can pull an Orpheus?”

“Nope,” I said, smiling at the twinkle. It said I really might have a chance after all. “I’m planning on pulling a Ravirn.”

“Who deals first?” asked Bob.

“High card?”
I asked, holding out the deck.

Cerberus’s right paw reached forward to draw but was foiled by the narrowness of the gate.

“That could be a problem,” I said. “Do you want to step in here?”

“Can’t,” replied Mort.
“Against the rules.
We’re still alive. Hades is very specific about that.”

“How about I come out there?”

All three throats began a low growling. It made my bones itch, but I kept smiling.

“Don’t be like that. I’m not talking about going all the way down to the river or anything. Just give me three steps. No, two. You’ll still be between me and escape. How much harm can there be in two steps?”

“Once you’re on this side, you could hook up to the mweb and gate out,” said Mort.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “A gate takes a good minute to form and another to cycle. You’d rip me to shreds before the spell was half-finished.”

“Oh, what can it hurt?” said Dave, and I thought I heard a wink in his voice. “He’s right about the gate.”

There was some grumbling, but soon the trio backed up. When I stepped through the arch, I was careful to go no more than the two steps I’d specified. Running was
not
going to do me any good. Cerberus would be less forgiving than Bob, Mort, and Dave.

Mort pulled an ace and dealt the first hand. When the bidding came around to me for the second time I went
seven no-trump, the toughest contract in the game
. Bob whistled, Mort snickered, and Dave swore. He was the one who was going to have to help me pull it off.

After I took the second trick, I jerked my head at Melchior. “Make a call for me, would you?”

Bob gave me the gimlet look. “Hold it. You said no smart stuff, just cards. Why should we let you call anybody?”

“What can it hurt?” I asked. “You’re the biggest, baddest dog in all creation. About the only thing you could have to worry about is if I had Necessity backing me up via my speed dial. But if that were the case I wouldn’t have had to come in the hard way, now would I?”

“Necessity on your speed dial,” snorted Mort, though he looked a little nervous about the mention of that name. “Good one. He’s got a point, Bob. Why not let him make the call?”

Bob grumbled a bit, then asked, “Who you gonna call?”

“A friend.
She’s totally harmless, shorter than your shortest tooth.” I reached out and boldly tapped one of Bob’s canines, pricking my finger. “You boys aren’t afraid of a wee tiny webpixie, are you? I just installed a phone circuit for her, and it seems rude to die without giving it a test. Here.” I pressed my bleeding finger to my lips. “By my blood and my honor I swear she is what I say.”

The twinkle in Dave’s eye returned, brighter this time. “I’m game, if for no other reason than to find out what it is you’re up to.” He raised a questioning eyebrow.

I just smiled and signaled for Melchior to make the call. Kira arrived a few minutes later. She had to be terrified, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at her; as Melchior had said, attitude enough for a herd of webtrolls.

“How’s the hardware working?” I asked her.

“Great.” She landed on my shoulder. “I found this really slick file-swapping software at
jollyroger.mag
. It’s called Theftster, and I’ve downloaded like nine thousand tunes.”

“Tunes?” asked Mort, his pupils widening in sudden concern. “What’s this?”

Cerberus leaped to his feet.

“Now would be good!” I said to Kira.

She didn’t need my prodding; Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” was already pouring out of her open mouth.

A paw the size of a Saint Bernard landed on me, pinning me to the ground. One claw point pricked my throat just over the Adam’s apple, and I knew that I’d lost. I closed my eyes and waited for the end. At least I’d reunited Shara and Cerice.

Seconds went by. Though I could feel a trickle of blood making me a crimson necklace, the pressure didn’t increase, and I didn’t die. Then a new noise joined Kira’s replay, a great rumbling snore. I opened one eye. Mort’s head lay closest to me, its eyes firmly closed, a trickle of drool forming at the corner of his mouth. Slowly and carefully I crawled out from under the paw. Bob was the one snoring. A tiny hint of black fire was just visible under Dave’s left eyelid, as though he were still partially awake. When I looked closer, it flickered closed in what I could have half sworn was a wink.

I turned to Kira, and whispered, “If you’re willing, I’d love to set you up with a triple headset. I know you’re looking for work, and I think Cerberus would make a great boss. He’s loyal and he’s tough and you’ve got a lot in common personality-wise. What do you think?”

She looked the big guy over consideringly,
then
nodded, not answering with words for reasons too obvious to go into.

“Good enough,” I said. “I’m going to get going now and skip out on the whole rise-and-shine thing. Look me up when you’ve figured out the details, or if it doesn’t work out.”

I turned to Melchior, who was standing perfectly still against the side of the underworld gate. He was doing a pretty good impression of the stonework he’d pressed himself into.

“Gate?”
I asked. He jerked his chin toward the water’s edge as if to say, “not here,” put a finger to his lips, and headed in that direction. I left the cards where they were and started after him. I’d barely gone two stops before a question occurred to me, and I turned back to Kira.
“Why not Monteverdi’s
L’orfeo
?”

“Joy to the World” was just ending, and Kira
paused
a heartbeat before going on to her next track. “Does he really look like an opera fan?” Then she started into Temple of the Dog’s “Wooden Jesus.”

I shook my head and, moving with exquisite caution, followed Melchior to the dock where I’d left my scuba gear. As I slid beneath the waters, I took one last look at the sleeping mountain that was Cerberus.

Orpheus might have been the greatest musician who ever lived: with only a lyre he’d eased the hound of hell’s insomnia. I didn’t have that kind of talent. But I did have a heck of a hardware advantage and a bottomless supply of tunes. Play a song for a hellhound, and you’ll give him music for a day. Teach him to pirate MP3s, and you’ll give him music for eternity. Couple that with Kira’s alarm clock
function,
and I figured he might even thank me someday.

Though it was almost 1:00 A.M. when I got back to the Decision Locus where Cerice and I currently made our home, she wasn’t in the apartment. After I returned myself to human-seeming and grabbed a snack, I got ready to head for the lab and my much-deserved reward. I’d actually opened the front door when a gentle chime from Melchior announced that the e-mail I’d sent myself from Hades’ computer had arrived.

“You want to read it now?” he asked.

Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead.
As always, I hate you . . .
The memory of those words seemed seared into my brain, along with the goddess’s pain.
I didn’t need that right now. I wanted to enjoy the high of the ultimate hack job, successfully cracking Hades itself, and I couldn’t think of a bigger downer than reading Persephone’s hate mail and thinking about what she might ask of me later. I shook my head.

“No thanks, Mel. Park it in a password-protected folder for later inspection.”

“Can do,” he said.

Then we headed out. When we got to Cerice’s building, I picked the various locks myself instead of getting Melchior to magic them open for me. I felt fabulous and couldn’t resist the pure mischief of it. I took extra care with the lock on her door, opening it as silently as possible. I wanted to surprise her.

“Ta-dah!”
I said, stepping inside.

Cerice was sitting in a chair on the far side of the room, her feet propped up on about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of custom mainframe. She looked even
more weary
and stressed than the last time I’d seen her and barely seemed to register my presence. Finally, she turned her head my way.

“Ta-dah?”
She looked confused. Then hope bloomed in her tired eyes—hope and the first hint of true happiness I’d seen there in a long time—and she leaped to her feet. “Where is she?”

“Isn’t she here?” I could feel the ground under my feet going spongy, lab tile about to turn to quicksand. “I sent her ahead.”

“You what?”

“Sent her ahead.”
I glanced at Melchior for support. “We e-mailed her.” Cerice looked at me like I was totally out of my mind. “We did! When was the last time you checked your e-mail?”

Cerice pointed at the monitor hooked to the mainframe. An open mail window was clearly visible. To any normal person it would have looked like another typical UNIX e-mail client, but I recognized
an
mweb-enabled program originally written by Clotho.

“You’re sure you haven’t gotten an e-mail from Hades with a really huge attachment?” I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe it hit your spam filters and—”

“Ravirn,” said Cerice, “anything over ten
meg
is going to trigger a query on whether or not I want to download it. How big a file are we talking?”

“I don’t
know,
a couple of terabytes maybe?”

“Two-point-two-nine,” said Melchior, whose silicon memory was much more precise than my own faulty organics.
“Sent at 9:38 Olympus Standard Time.
And before you ask, yes, we sent it to the right address. Shara double-checked it herself.”

“She did?” I asked.

“She did.”

“Well then where the hell did she go?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Melchior. “Shit.
The oath.”

I could feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I’d always figured that if I could get in and out of the underworld alive, I’d have this caper pretty much sewn up. The possibility that I could be both alive and in violation of my oath had never even occurred to me. Yet here I was. And if Shara didn’t show up mighty quick, I was going to have some unhappy Furies making a house call.

“Melchior.
Laptop.
Please.”

He hopped onto the desk and shifted shape. I dropped into a chair and started hitting keys. It was at times like this that I most missed the tip of my left pinkie. The loss had cost me a couple of words a minute typing speed. Still, I got a graphic representation of the mweb connections between Hades and this DecLocus’s version of Harvard up pretty quickly.

There were an infinite number of possible routing solutions to get a set of packets from there to here, but only a couple of optimum solutions. For a job the size of Shara, the mweb master servers would be very careful not to take unnecessary steps. The network had bandwidth beyond the wildest dreams of human coders, but it had been designed always to optimize that resource—the hand of Necessity there.

By hacking the tracking system at
Clotho.net
I was able to get a lock on one big mother of an e-mail coming out of Hades and heading by direct link from there into the Fate’s central routing system . . . where it vanished. Poof! No more packets.

“What the . . .” Cerice was looking over my shoulder. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, madly hitting keys and calling up further information. “She hasn’t been erased or quarantined. There’d be some evidence of that. She’s just gone.”

I pushed my chair back from the desk. I was trying to sound calm. I actually sounded dead, which was fair. I
was
dead. I’d escaped the Furies once before because I’d gotten very, very lucky. It wasn’t likely to happen again.

“Don’t give up yet.” Cerice took my place in front of Melchior.

His screen shifted, displaying nothing but ones and zeros. I prefer a nice clean graphical interface for computer and spell work. It’s closer to the way I think. Cerice goes straight into the underlying code, and she’s used her own personal magic to enhance her abilities there. Sometimes I think she’s half computer herself. Screen after screen of binary flew by so fast it blurred into complete nonsense for me.

“There!” she cried, bring the show to a stop.
“Right there.”
Her finger touched the screen, and Melchior obligingly magnified that section of code.

I didn’t know what was around it, so all I could tell was that is was some sort of routing command. “What is it?”

“It’s a hardware-level autofunction,” said Cerice, “and it grabbed Shara.”

“Hardware-level?
Are you sure?” That could get really ugly really fast.

While the mweb is administered by the Fates through their individual webtroll servers, I’d learned recently that the actual core architecture is a cluster of multiprocessor quantum mainframes that come preassembled from Necessity herself. When a replacement unit is needed, it’s delivered by the Furies, who are the only goddesses allowed to interact with Necessity directly. More than that, nobody knows.