Quintessence Sky (50 page)

Mark touched down, refolded his jetvac, and
slung it over his shoulder. Darin, spotting him, jumped up with
arms spread wide.

"Prince Mark," he said. "You honor us with
your presence."

Mark ignored the jibe. "What's he doing
here?"

"I invited him."

"You didn't ask me," said Mark. "What if he
tells someone?"

"Stop worrying," said Darin. "He'll be
fine."

"This isn't exactly legal," said Mark.

"But what fun would it be if we didn't show
it to anyone?"

Mark sighed. He'd long since given up on
winning an argument with Darin.

"Praveen knows more astronomy than either of
us," Darin continued, "and he can video the fireworks while we make
them happen. Of course, I still didn't tell Praveen
what
's
going to happen."

Mark allowed a smile. He wanted to ask what
Darin
had
told Praveen, but by that time Praveen joined
them.

In recent years, Praveen had darkened his
skin and hair to accentuate his Indian heritage. A double row of
lithium niobate crystals studded his brow: a state-of-the-art Visor
that rivaled Mark's own.

"And here's the genius in person," said
Darin. "Can you actually be seen with us, Praveen, or will your
agent bill us for the time?"

"You flatter me," Praveen said in a musical
Indian accent he never had when they were young.

"Nonsense. Apparently you wrote quite a
paper. You deserve the praise."

Praveen waved aside the compliments, but he
was obviously pleased. His physicist grandfather, Dhaval Kumar, had
established some of the theoretical principles behind
non-attenuating laser light, the applications of which made Visor
technology and the world-wide optical network possible. Praveen,
who idolized his granddad, had recently been published himself in a
prominent physics journal—one of the youngest ever to do so. Most
of his peers didn't recognize what a triumph it was for him.

"You brought your camera?" Mark asked
him.

"Yes, of course. But for what? Darin did not
tell me."

Darin crouched in the grass, ignoring the
question.

He unzipped a pouch at his waist and began
laying out his netmask and its sensory apparatus—a cumbersome
bio-electronic interface that connected eyes, ears, and mouth to a
net interface. Mark had offered, more than once, to pay for a
Visor, but of course Darin wouldn't hear of it.

Mark busied himself with the telescopes. The
zoom mods in his eyes were no more adequate to view an astronomical
event than one of those tiny camera drones was to holograph it. He
snapped a memory crystal into the back and worked to calibrate the
lenses. On the far side of the crater, he could see the
hydroelectric dam that provided most of the city's power shining
white in the darkness. Above it, a few stars twinkled faintly.

"Had a little trouble getting here," said
Darin. Something in his voice caused Mark to turn around.

"Why?"

"Merc at the corner of 28th and Hill," said
Darin. "Almost wouldn't let me pass."

"Were you polite?"

"As a politician. I guess he didn't like the
look of my telescope."

"He's just there to keep the peace."

"He wouldn't have stopped you," said Darin.
"He only stopped me because I'm a Comber, not because I was doing
anything wrong. Rimmers are too attached to their comfortable
lifestyle—you hire mercs to protect it, and call it 'keeping the
peace'."

"They're preventing violence, not causing it.
That's peace-keeping in anyone's book."

"Who causes violence,citizens who stand up
for their rights, or those who take them away?"

Mark let it drop. Lately, Darin argued social
philosophy at any provocation. They'd been school friends long
before they understood the class differences, Mark's father having
chosen public school over private tutors for political reasons.
Even now, Mark agreed with Darin's perspectives more than his
Rimmer peers', so it frustrated him when Darin's accusative
pronouns shifted from 'they' to 'you'.

"Please," said Praveen, "I must know what am
I photographing. I can not set my light levels unless I can
estimate intensity and contrast."

Mark glanced at Darin, who was busy louvering
a sticky lens into one eye. The back of the lens bristled with tiny
fibers that Darin labored to keep free of tangles., "Tell him," he
said.

"It's a flare," said Mark. "A NAIL
flare."

He watched, amused, as Praveen's face went
through a series of confused expressions. Praveen certainly knew
more than they did about the various NAIL constellations of
satellites. NAIL stood for Non-Attenuating Infrared Laser, and
accounted for almost all of the optical net traffic in the country.
The satellites were renowned for their half-mile-wide main
antennas, umbrella-like dishes coated with a reflective material.
When the angles between sun, satellite, and observer were just
right, a burst of sunlight was reflected: a flare, lasting up to
ten seconds and reaching magnitudes between minus ten and minus
twelve—much brighter than anything else in the night sky. Amateur
astronomers scrambled around the world to the sites the flares were
predicted to appear.

Praveen rolled his eyes. "Just because it
flies over does not mean you will see a flare. I cannot believe you
dragged me out here. The next good flare is not for months, and I
think it is only visible from Greenland."

"Don't put that camera away," said Mark.
"Darin and me, we don't like to wait for months. And Greenland's
too cold."

"Ready," said Darin.

Praveen's face changed again. "You're
hackers? I don't believe this."

"We're nothing of the sort," said Mark.
"Hackers are criminals. Hackers break into nodes to steal or
destroy. Crackers, on the other hand, are in it for fun, for the
thrill of the race, for the intellectual challenge. And this," he
smiled, "is a crackerjack."

"A fine distinction."

"No time to argue," said Mark. "Just man that
camera."

Darin sat up, a grotesquerie of
celgel-smeared fibers protruding from eyes, ears, and throat. Mark
simply relaxed against the hillside and unfocused his eyes.
Billions of information-laden photons, careening invisibly around
him, were manipulated into coherence by the holographic crystals in
his Visor. The feed from the crystals spliced directly into his
optic nerve, overlaying his normal vision with the familiar icons
of his net interface.

Using slight movements of his eyes, he
navigated deeper into the system, found a procedure called "Connect
NAIL Public Portal", and executed it. At its request for a
pass-image, Mark envisioned a regular icosahedron, faces shaded
blue, and it granted him access. Most people chose familiar faces
for their pass-images, but Mark preferred geometric shapes. They
required a good spacial mind to envision properly, reducing the
chance that someone else could hack into his system.

Mark checked the satellite he was connected
through, verifying it was not the one they were targeting. Wouldn't
do to lose a connection before they were able to clean up. A few
more queries told him the NAIL satellite now entering the eastern
sky was a dedicated one for federal military use. So much the
better. He opened the account directory and chose an entry. It
didn't matter which, since he didn't intend to complete the call.
At random, he selected a recipient at the Navy base in Norfolk,
Virginia.

You there, Darin?
he sent.

Right in here with you.

Mark paused. Despite his bravado out on the
hill, this would be the most ambitious jack they'd ever attempted.
If they crashed it, the security agents would snag their IDs, and
well, the federal government didn't have much clout anymore, but it
could still lock them away for a long time. But hey, where was the
rush without the risk? He took a deep breath, and placed the
call.

No turning back now. In order to call, the
software had to access the encryption algorithm, which meant
opening a socket—a data hole—into the command level. The hole would
be open for less than a microsecond, but a hole was a hole.

Mark watched the process logs: account lookup
. . . server handshake . . . message collation . . . Sensing the
open socket at the precise moment, his software reacted, opening a
chute to prevent it from closing normally.

Chute is holding,
Darin reported, and
then,
Dropping caterpillar.
Another cracker, one of Darin's,
copied itself through the chute into the system beyond.

Mark hoped the caterpillar would be quick.
Written to resemble a worm, which the security software agents
fought on a daily basis, the caterpillar was bait. Thinking it was
just a worm, the software agents would kill it, and the
caterpillar, just before dying, would fire back crucial information
about the agents to Mark and Darin.

At least, that was the plan. Mark always
feared the worst: that a top-flight software agent would sniff the
jack and follow the trail right back through the chute. A
caterpillar had to be quick, or the risks outweighed the gain.

Anything yet?
he sent.

I knew you'd snap.

Have not. I'm just falling asleep waiting for
your junkware.

The caterpillar spouted a stream of data.
Mark studied it to see what they would be up against. Looked like a
few sentries, a strongman, and . . .
Scan it!

What?

A nazi. They've got a nazi. That's it, I'm
collapsing the . . .

Keep your panties on. We've got a few
seconds—drop your kevorkian.

But—

Drop it!

Cringing, Mark obeyed.

Nazis were the most feared of security
agents, but common lore said their weakness was in their strength.
They were so powerful that they were equipped with fail-safes,
mechanisms to put them to sleep if they started attacking friendly
system code. A kevorkian played off this concept, faking data to
convince the nazi it was doing serious damage. The nazi then killed
itself, and would remain dead—they hoped—until a sysadmin could
take a look.

Mark had written this kevorkian himself, and
was proud of it, but it had never been tested against a genuine
nazi. He cringed, expecting at any moment to see a surge of data
that would mean disaster.

You got him
, said Darin.

What?

You got him.

Mark swallowed the acid that had been rising
in his throat.
Of course I did. Now jump in there and get this
bird turning.

MARIE Coleson knew enough about slicers to be
careful. Despite practically living here at the Norfolk anti-viral
lab for the last two years, she'd never handled software so
volatile. The slicer reacted unpredictably to every test, and never
the same way twice.

Because it was human. Not a person—Marie
refused to believe that it could genuinely think or feel emotion.
But generated from a human mind, and just as complex and flexible
and,well, intelligentas the original. Marie's job was to break it
down, understand its inner workings, and write tools to defeat it.
Fortunately, she'd caught it just as it went active on one of the
city's rental memory blocks. If it had distributed copies of itself
on the open net, it would have been much harder to contain.

She stood, stretched, and walked to the
coffee machine. It was past nine, but that was hardly unusual.
Since she'd walked into a Navy recruitment center last April, she'd
spent most of her time in this tiny room, with its faded paint and
ten-year-old promotional posters. In the six decades since the
Conflict, the federal Navy's volunteer list had declined as rapidly
as the federal government's power, so she figured they were
desperate for anyone. Uncle Sam would have grown her a soldier's
armored body, but by the time her turn came up, she'd proved so
useful in the lab that she was assigned electronic security detail
instead.

It didn't matter to Marie. Not much mattered
to her anymore. Not since a flier accident two days before
Christmas had killed her husband and son. Two years ago now. She
mourned Keith, but didn't miss him; the marriage had been falling
apart anyway. That last year, he’d rarely been home, and when he
was, they’d done nothing but fight. But Samuel, little Sammy, her
angel, her peanut: what could be worth doing now that he was
gone?

Sometimes, late in the evening, alone in the
lab like she was tonight, Marie fantasized about becoming a mother
again. It wasn't impossible.The fertility treatments that had
produced Sammy had left an embryo unused. It was still there at the
clinic, kept in frozen possibility. But she was forty-two years
old, for heavens sake. Too old to consider starting such a
life.

This was her life now, this lab—fighting
viruses, worms, phages, krakens. Investigating, classifying,
designing anti-viruses, sometimes for twenty hours a day. Any time
not required for other military duties, she spent here. It kept her
mind busy, and that she desperately needed.

She sipped her coffee, staring through the
faded walls into her memories of the past. She was still standing
there when Pamela Rider peeked through the door. Pam worked for
Navy administration in the next building over, but she stopped by
whenever she could.

"Don't you ever go home?" Pam said.

"Hi, Pam."

"Or out?” Pam sat the wrong way around in a
swivel chair, the backrest between her legs and her arms crossed on
top. Her tan was smooth and permanent, and her elegant legs had
been lengthened and tapered by regular mod treatments. In a cotton
flower-print dress, she cut a striking image, making Marie feel
frumpy in her plasticwear overall.

"When was the last time you saw a guy?" asked
Pam.

"You know I’m not interested."