Jennifer Morgue (34 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
The black beret gets up and leaves in a hurry. "It's very unfortunate, this geas," she explains. "I could spill important stuff by accident, and then I'd have to send him to Human Resources for recycling." Her shoulder pads twitch up and down briefly, miming: What can you do? "It's hard enough to get the staff as it is."
"This looks like a great system," I say, fingering the frame of the workstation. "So you've got access to the eyeballs of anyone who's wearing Pale Grace(TM) eye shadow? That must be really hard to filter effectively." I'm guessing that I've got Eileen's number. I've seen her type before, stuck in a pale green annex block our behind rhe donut in Cheltenham, desperate to show off how well she's organized her departmental brief. Eileen's little cosmetics operation is genuine enough, but she came out of spook country just the same as Ellis did: staring at goats for state security. (Forget the whack-jobs at Fort Bragg; there's stuff the Black Chamber gets up to that makes it very useful to have a bunch of useful idiots prancing around in public out front, convincing everybody that it's all a bunch of New Age twaddle.) Eileen isn't much of a necromancer, but she's got the ghostly spoor of midlevel occult intelligence management all over her designer suit, and she's desperate for professional recognition.
"It's top of the range." She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it's still there: "This baby's got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence(TM) middleware cluster[11 Translation: "a bunch of computers."] connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe."
Her smile softens at the edges, turning slightly sticky: "It's the best remote-viewing mission support environment there is, including Amherst. We know. We built the Amherst lab."
Amherst lab? It's got to be a Black Chamber project. I keep my best poker face on: this is useful shit, if I ever get a chance to tell Angleton about it via a channel who isn't code named Charlie Victor. But right now I've got something more immediate to do. "That's impressive," I say, putting all the honesty I can muster at short notice into my voice. "Can I have a look at the front panel"
Eileen nods. The hairs at the nape of my neck stand on end: for a moment everything seems to be limned in an opalescent glow and her gaze is simultaneously fixed on my face and looking at something a million miles away — no, infinitely far away: at an archetype I've borrowed, at an identity with the ability to sway any woman's sanity, the talent to lie like a rug and charm their knickers off at the same time. "Be my guest." She giggles, which is a not entirely appropriate sound — but sanity and consistency are in decreasing supply this close to the geas field generator (which, unless I am very much mistaken, is one deck up and five meters over from where we're standing). I reach up with one hand and flip the front panel down to look at the blinkenlights and status readouts on the front of the box. Eileen's still looking at me, glassily: I run my hand down the front panel, the palmed thumb drive between two fingers, and a moment later I twitch my finger over the reset button then flip the lid closed.
The screen freezes for a moment, then an error message dialog box flashes up. Eileen blinks and glances at the monitor then her head whips round: "What did you just do"
I roll out my best blank look. "Huh? I just closed the front panel. Is it a power glitch?" I can't believe my luck.
Now if only Eileen didn't notice me stick the stubby little piece of plastic in the exposed USB keyboard socket...
She leans forwards, over the screen. "One of the servers just went offline." She sniffs then straightens up and waves the nearest beret over: "Get Neumann back here, his station's acting up." She looks at me suspiciously then glances at the workstation, her gaze flickering across the lid of the blade server. "I thought they'd fixed the rollover bug," she mutters.
"Do you still need me around?" I ask.
"No." She knows something's not right but she can't quite put her finger on it: the alarm bells are ringing in her head but the geas has wrapped a muffling sock disguised as a software bug around the hammer. "I don't like coincidences, Mr.
Howard. You'd better stick close to your quarters until further notice."
The goons escort me back to the padded-cell luxuries of the yacht. I'm trying not to punch the air and shout "Yes!" at the top of my voice: it's bad form to gloat. So I let them shut me in and look appropriately chastened until they go away again. I chucked the tux jacket in the closet this morning. Now I rifle through the pockets quickly until I find the business !
card Kitty gave me. Yes, it is scratch 'n' sniff on steroids: about five tiny compartments full of Pale Grace(TM) mascara, eye shadow, foundation, and other stuff I don't recognize.
There's even a teensy brush recessed into one side of it, like the knife on a Swiss Card. Humming tunelessly I pull out the brush and quickly sketch out a diagram on the bathroom mirror — a reversed image of the one I sketched in the sand around the hire car. With any luck it'll damp down any access they've got to the cabin until they wise up and come to look in on me in person. Then I take a deep breath and imagine myself punching the air and shouting "Yes!" by way of relief. (Better safe than sorry.) Let me draw you a diagram: Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that's not all there is to ... well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let's call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.
Eileen Billington's intelligence-gathering back end relies on a classic contagion network. The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free — it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors. When you apply a contagion field to any kind of information storage system, you make it possible to suck the data out via any other point in the contagion field. Eileen is already running a contagion field — it's the root of her surveillance system.
I've got a PC on my desk that isn't connected to the ship's network, but I've just stuffed a clone of its brain into a machine that is on that network — so all I need to do is contaminate my own box with Pale Grace(TM), and then ...
Well, it's not as easy as all that. In fact, at first I'm shitscared that I've broken the TV (I'm pretty sure the warranty specifically excludes damage due to the USB ports being full of mascara) but then I figure out a better way. Tracing the Fallworth graph on the bathroom mirror backwards with a Bluetooth pen hooked into the television is not the recommended way of establishing a similarity link with a network you're trying to break into — it's not even the second worst way of doing so — but it just happens to be the only one I've got available to me, so I use it. Once I've brought up the virtual interface I poke around until I find the VPN port that the USB dongle I planted in Eileen's server farm is running.
The keystroke logger is happily snarfing login accounts, and I figure out pretty rapidly that Eileen's INFOSEC people aren't paranoid enough — they figure that for systems aboard a goddamn destroyer, who needs to go to the bother of biometrics or a challenge/response system like S/Key? They want something they can get into fast and reliably, so they're using passwords, and my dongle's captured six different accounts already. I rub my knuckles and go poking around the server farm to see what they're doing with it. Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV
Nation, and a ctate of Pringles: that's like being at home. Give me root access on a hostile necromancer's server farm, and I am at home.
Still, I'm worried about Mo. That view Eileen wanted me to vet — even if Eileen bought my story — means that Mo is here, on the island, and she's under the gun. The Pale' Grace(TM) surveillance net is tracking her and the stabbing sense of anxiety that doubles as my guilty conscience tells me I need to make sure she's all right before I start trying to figure out a way to reestablish communications with Control.
So I pull up a VNC session, log into one of Eileen's server blades using a password looted from one of the black berets, and go hunting for a chase cam.
13: FIDDLER HITS THE ROOF
TEN HOURS ABOARD AN AIRBUS IS NEVER A HAPPY fun experience, even in business class. By the time Mo feels the nose gear touch down on the centerline of the runway, rattling the glasses up front in the galley, she's tired, with a bone-weary exhaustion that is only going to go away if she can find the time to crash for twelve straight hours on an oversprung hotel mattress.
But. But. Mo hums tunelessly to herself as the airbus taxis towards the terminal. What's he gotten himself into this time?
she asks herself, a bright point of worry burning through the blanket of fatigue. Angleton wasn't remotely reassuring, and after that disturbing interview with Alan she went and did some digging. Asked Milton, actually, the one-armed, old security sergeant with the keys to the conservatory and the instrument store. "What's a big white one?" she repeated, refusing to take the first answer he offered — or to notice the prickling in her ears and the flush of blood to her cheeks until he set her straight.
Fuck. Nukes? What the wily old bastard had been offering Alan — right under her nose! — was a kamikaze insurance policy. The realization fills her with even more apprehension.
Bob's got himself into something so dicey that Angleton thinks a destroyer full of SAS and SBS special forces isn't enough, and they may need to call in a Trident D-5 ballistic missile to nail whatever's been stirred up down there. That kind of overkill isn't on the menu, outside of a bad spy thriller: that or CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, anyway, and CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN hasn't started yet, and even then the real nasties probably won't arrive until at least ten years after the grand alignment commences.[12 They tend to oversleep.] As soon as the seatbelt sign blinks off and the cabin crew announces that it's safe for passengers to leave their seats, Mo is up like a jack-in-the-box to haul down her overnight bag, wide-brimmed hat, and the battered violin case from the overhead locker. She clutches the instrument case protectively all the way to the baggage claim area and immigration queue, as if she's walking through a dangerous part of town and it's a gun. But when the customs officer gives her the hairy eyeball and asks her to open it she smiles brightly and clicks back the locks to reveal — a violin.
"See?" she says. "It's an Erich Zahn special, wired with Hilbert-space pickups. I don't think there's another one on this side of the Atlantic." She's relying on his ignorance to let her through. Polished to the creamy gleam of old ivory, the electric violin nestles in its case like a Tommy gun, to all outward appearances nothing but a musical instrument. Just '' don't ask me to play it, she prays. The custom officer nods, satisfied it's not an offensive weapon, and waves her on. Mo closes the case with false calm, nods her head, and locks the instrument back in. If only you knew ...
One airport concourse is much like any other. Mo tows her suitcase over to the exit, where taxis jostle for position opposite the curb. It smells hot and damp with a faint undertone of rotting seaweed. There are people everywhere, tourists in bright clothes, natives, business types. A woman in a suit brandishes a clipboard at her: "Hi! How would you like a free sample of eyeliner, ma'am"
Why the hell not? Mo nods and accepts the sample, smiles, idly rubs a smear of it on her wrist to check the color, and moves on before the woman can deliver her sales spiel. Okay, the hotel next. That'll do. As she walks through the door the Saint Martin climate clamps down on her like a warm, wet blanket, coating her in sweat. Abruptly, she's grateful for the hat and the sundress Wardrobe Department insisted she wear. It's not her style at all, but her usual jeans and blouse would be ... Hell, call me the Wicked Witch of the West and have done with it. She fans herself with the hat as she walks over to the taxi queue. What a mess.
"Where to, ma'am?" asks the taxi driver. He's pegged her for a tourist, probably American; he doesn't bother to get out and help her with the suitcase.
"Maho Beach Hotel, if you don't mind." She glances at him in the mirror: he's got crow's-feet around prematurely aged eyes, hair the color of damp newsprint.
"Okay. Twenty euros."
"Got it."
He starts the engine. Mo leans back and closes her eyes.
She doesn't let her fingers stray from the violin case, but to a casual onlooker she could be snoozing off a case of jet lag. In fact, when she's not keeping a surreptitious eye open for tails, she's working her way down a checklist she's already committed to memory. Let's see. Check in, phone home for a Sitrep, confirm Alan's on site, then ... a guilty frisson: off the roadmap.
Find Bob. If necessary, find this Ramona person. Make sure Bob's safe. Then figure out how to get him disentangled before it sucks him in too deep ...
Anxiety keeps her awake every meter of the way to the hotel drags her tired ass to the front desk for checkin: "Mrs. Hudson? Your husband checked in this morning. He said you'd be arriving and to leave you a key to your suite." The receptionist smiles mechanically. "Have a nice stay!"
Husband? Mo blinks and nods, making thankful sounds on autopilot. "Which room is he in?"
"You're in 412. Elevators are left past the fountain."
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