Roo'd (10 page)

"It's time" said Cessus. He reached up and twisted off one of his rubberized dreads and placed it carefully on the table between them. Midway through its length it was banded with a glowing blue ring.

"This thing starts blinking, you start chatting into your comp and slowly go out to the elevators. Punch the third floor - it's another restaurant - and take the stairs down to the front. Then get a cab and go home. You got that?" He stood up, adjusted his shirt.

"Where're you going?" asked Fed.

"To the bathroom" said Cessus.

He turned and left.

Fede was suddenly aware of the fact that he was sitting in front of a melted bowl of ice cream, a newspaper containing a metal-mesh signal shield, and a hidden tracking antenna through which they were hijacking a connection from somebody's house a half-mile away.

The waiter appeared, collected the dish and Cessus's empty coffee cup, and disappeared.

Fede realized this was the first time he'd been alone since he'd found out about the Boers and all the trouble. Up until now he'd just been reacting, doing what he was told. And what the hell were they doing messing with Disney, anyway? The megacorp had become world renowned for their vicious investment and takeover cycles, leading the way in overseas labor exploitation and almost single-handedly reworking the World Trade Organization committees in their favor. Disney had become synonymous with sweatshops, black market trafficking, and stock manipulation. They'd pioneered the concept of corporate armed forces, generating a marketing spin-off to DARPA which eventually partnered with and was then sold to the U.S. government. Along the way they'd bought a couple third-world countries and used their citizenships as testing grounds for new products. The Disney nations were wonders of Darwinian downbreeding and ongoing corporate propaganda as enforced by law. They were scary, scary places.

Cessus had a right to hate them, although Fede didn't know why he was so willing to go head-to-head. It was only business, after all.

In any case Tonx was out there risking his ass right now, and by extension so was he. If they were hijacking Poulpe from them Disney sure as hell weren't going to sit around idle while they waited for him to come back. Defectors from Disney didn't last very long unless they got under some other corp's wing, and even then the battles for custody lasted forever. The Disney passport wasn't so much a permissions slip as a title of ownership.

Scary shit, and not exactly what Fede had been planning to do with himself. He was supposed to be studying, following the courses along a prescribed path to corporate security. Part of him had actually considered working for Disney; if you got a good contract they made sure you were set for life. Instead he was about to help steal from them.

Fede crossed his arms and stared out at the city moving slowly by beneath him. He tried hard not to think about Disney. The data streams in front of his eyes flowed on, modulating against the view, rippling the houses and cars below like water over rocks. Cessus had spent a long time just watching it work, scanning for anomalies, letting error-checking routines and monitoring tripwire software get a solid handle on what normal was. He'd held forth at Fede for a while about patterns, about the parts of your brain that recognized and managed large data sets without your conscious thought. Cessus seemed to think that the 90 per cent of the human brain that didn't seem to be doing anything actually did a lot, that it acted as a hugely subtle modulator for the electrical signals being used by that ten per cent that people could monitor. Fede had started to get interested until Cessus lapsed into theories about ESP and government mind control.

But he had made some good points. Fede knew that sometimes, when he was coding, he'd get so caught up in the overall pattern, the structure, that he'd code good-sized chunks without thinking about the specific lines he was writing. Those lines worked, they fit into the structure perfectly, but they'd been written by some other part of his brain. The module that handled the rules for code had done its job, and Fede hadn't had to think it through character by character to do it.

He was beginning to understand how Cessus could do the same thing with network monitoring.

"How do you tell how cold it is by looking out the window - barring obvious indicators like snow?" he'd asked. Fed hadn't had a good answer, had said "I just know."

"That's right" said Cessus. "You just know. Because your brain there knows how the light looks at that precise time of day in certain humidity and under particular wind speeds. Your brain knows that if the shadows are just so it must be cooler, that if the road is just that wet it's a particular humidity. You don't think about it, you just know."

Fede had remained unimpressed.

"It's the same with code, or network monitoring, or anything else you see on a screen. A good coder can often find the problem spot in code just by tabbing over it. He just seems to be able to find it, know what I mean?"

Fede did, but didn't understand the implication. "So what?"

"So anybody can do that. Once you learn a basic skill it becomes automatic, right? You can peel potatoes without thinking about it - you just do it. It's boring. Coding isn't like that because you have to think about
how
you use the skill. Sure you can write code - the writing part is automatic - but figuring out how to write the code to addresses each individual aspect of the overall program can require a lot of thought. That's the overhead you're imposing. It's just a matter of recognizing that your conscious mind isn't the part that 'knows' coding, or 'knows' what packet loss looks like. Your conscious mind is just an orchestra conductor. It's not playing the flute, it's telling the flute player to play. So if the flautist is doing his job just fine, why don't you leave the conductor bloody well enough alone?"

Fede scoffed. Cessus was constantly making stupid analogies like that, abstract comparisons that didn't make any sense. It was pissing him off.

"You're not making any sense. Are you saying you'd code better if you didn't think about it? That you could hack systems better if you stared off into space and let your fingers mash the chord?"

Cessus had just smiled a smug grin and turned back to his tripwires and data logs, the screen over his left eye sliding forward and into place.

Now Fede was left watching the same data streams flow in front of his vision, waiting for Cessus to come back. He knew that at some point Pharoe's guys would act and Cessus's daemons would snap into place, injecting fake TCP data packets in place of the real output from the Gaterville ISP. There was no point in starting that process any sooner than necessary, and with any luck the injection would be seamless. But Fede and Cessus both knew there was no such thing as perfect. There'd be some clue, and Fed's job was to watch for it, to map it out and see if it got caught.

It was simple, mindless watching, and as Fede sat still he kept coming back to what Cessus had said. He'd experienced that jolt of knowing before, of scanning over code without really thinking, of just letting your eyes go and suddenly - wham - you knew you were looking at the problem. It didn't happen all the time, but when it did it was effortless. Fast and efficient. But unreliable. It seemed stupid to Fede that Cessus would endorse thinking that way all of the time; "leveraging the massive" he'd called it. "Your brain's perfectly capable of parallel processing all on it's own. Don't try to implement your own resource management" he'd said.

It was crazy talk. But Fede couldn't forget it. Some part of it made sense.

His brain clicked, his thumb and forefinger tabbed a sequence, the screen split. On the top half the data continued to stream by, unchanged. Normal. The bottom half contained the buffered data from the last ten seconds of those streams, the most recent at the top. Fede stared. There is was - three packet handoffs, all identical. Packet handoffs happened sequentially, and error checking would have launched a correction sequence to verify any break, if the Gaterville ISP had caught it. He was looking at the slip, the error where Cessus's fake data had slid into the stream, and there was nothing. They were in.

"Nice" murmured a voice in his ear.

Fede jumped, banged his knee on the table, and tried to discreetly scan the restaurant.

"Figured you'd catch on fast, boy-o" said Cessus's voice. There was the faint sound of a urinal flushing. "Don't worry about those packet handoffs - I already deployed a log cleanup to cover the drop. As switches go it wasn't bad."

The sounds of hands being washed, of paper towels being yanked from a dispenser, of shoes clicking over tile filled Fed's ears over his comm. He'd almost gotten his heart out of his throat by the time Cessus had returned to the table. He gently re-affixed his dreadlock, put the newspaper back in the briefcase.

"Our work here is done. Let's pay the bill and go home. I deserve a treat."

"You deserve!" growled Fed. "What the fuck was that? Leaving me alone out here? You scared the shit out of me!"

"Period of maximum risk" said Cessus. "It was wiser for us to be apart should the mouse have been watching."

Fede looked up at Cessus, bewildered.

"If they'd busted in here they would have gone for me first" said Cessus. "If there were only a couple agents you might have been able to get away while I holed up in the can. At the very least you could have pleaded ignorance in court. It was actually," Cessus stood up, paused while his glasses receding to the sides of his head, "safer for you."

He turned and walked to the waiter's desk, paid with a credcard. Fede stormed by, past Cessus and towards the elevator bays.

"Excitable lad" he heard him say to the waiter. "Insisted we come up here to watch birds and then jumps half out of his skin when he sees one. Children these days, no sense for nature."

In Florida things were not proceeding quite so smoothly. When Esco'd gotten the signal they'd done exactly as planned, pausing only long enough for Baby to get his flyer back in the air. Then they'd stashed him in the tiny hunter's blind they'd setup by the side of the road, copious screamers giving off light chiming tones as they exited the area. They were synced in, of course, passive transponders embedded in their asses giving off 2048-bit certs every half second as the screamers scanned them.

Esco'd driven to within three hundred yards of the cabin and helped Pepe get suited up with a bulletproof vest. He briefed him again, quickly. Then he stepped out of the truck and lit a cigarette, fitting an earcomm and checking in with Baby for an all clear before giving Pepe the thumb's up. Pepe nodded once and threw the truck into reverse, his brow furrowed as he stared fixedly at the rear-view monitor. Esco knew Baby had his hands full with the fliers and said a quick prayer before Pepe and the truck disappeared around the bend in the road.

A second later Esco saw the fliers shoot into the air, the black one, the one like a huge wasp, gaining altitude much faster than the pink dildo. Then he heard the bang of the truck's rear doors flying open and the echoing retort as three barrels of chemical battery drained all at once. Esco breathed deep and threw his cigarette on the ground, rubbed it out with the sole of his shoe. He started walking up the road.

As he rounded the corner he saw the truck parked cantilever to the other two cars, facing directly away from the cabin. Its rear doors were snapped out and the driver's side door was open, bulletproof panels folded down and braced against the ground. Pepe huddled behind it, his flechette gun snapping from one window to another. The air smelled of ozone, but the yard was quiet. Their target lay still on the porch. This close Esco could see the wet stains on the bottom of the bag. He was glad they'd be able to dump the tanks and store this guy in the back; gringos always stank like shit when they sweat.

Esco coughed gently, pulled out his phone and switched it to sync with the loudspeakers in the back of the car.

"Gentlemen" he began. Nothing happened. "Fucking Christ, Pepe" he hollered. "Did you turn off the fucking car?"

"Yeah" came the muffled reply, the flechette snapping from one cabin window to the door to the other window. "Sorry, is habit."

"Habit my fucking ass you stupid shit. How the fuck we going to make our demands we don't got no loudspeaker?"

Esco looked at his phone for a moment before tucking it back into his jacket pocket. He'd rehearsed his speech all afternoon, and now he didn't get to use it.

"All right, go get the package. They've figured it out by now anyway. And for gods sakes try not to drop him."

Pepe didn't move for a moment, then shook his head, one muscle in his neck quivering like a bowstring in the hot afternoon sun.

"What the hell does that mean?" grunted Esco. He took three steps forward and snapped the sharp tip of his sharkskin loafers into Pepe's right kidney.

"You ain't getting paid to choose your job here, man. Get off your fucking ass and do your fucking job."

Esco held out a hand for the flechette and fished in his jacket for a cigarette with the other. The pistol grip hit his palm with an angry slap, but Esco didn't respond, just lit his smoke with a silver butane lighter. He leaned against the hood of the truck, rested the barrel of the pistol on the doorframe, and inhaled deeply. What a fuckup. The electromagnetic pulse they'd shot through the cabin had fried every kind of electronics within a hundred meters, including most of the screamers Baby had already mapped out. Their cars were likely fried as well - the truck Esco and crew had ridden in on had had to be specially shielded, and they were on the safe side of the EMP gun. There wasn't much in this world that didn't rely on some kind of digital control these days. The Boers were probably busy calculating the odds of their getting out of here and through the swamp alive. Didn't matter to Esco. They weren't his target here, and if they lived it wasn't likely they'd hold a grudge against losing some equipment.

Pepe had crept up to the porch, two long hunting knives clenched in his fists. Esco wondered idly if he knew how to use them. The package moaned slightly, and Pepe froze for a second.

"Hurry up!" shouted Esco.

Pepe put his right foot on the porch, eased his weight up onto it. The screen door swung open and the first Boer stepped out. He was a nondescript white guy, tanned and hard. Esco could see from here that he was hard, could see the stone-hard look in his eye and the line of his jaw as he lifted an empty hand, palm down, and flipped his fingers in a shooing motion at Pepe.

"You have no weapons" shouted Esco. "We've fried all your equipment. You're stranded. Surrender now" Esco had been starting to say more when Pepe had stepped up to the porch and the Boer stepped fully out of the cabin to meet him. As he did his other arm, the one away from Esco, the one shadowed by the drop of the roof and the dark of the cabin inside, had swung out and up, a two-foot gleaming grey tube snapping into place three inches from Pepe's forehead.

"What the fuck?" asked Pepe and Esco simultaneously, just before the antique single-action rifle blew the bright pink contents of Pepe's braincase across the yard.

"Fuck" yelled Esco, the flechette catching the Boer in the shoulder before he dropped the rifle and dove down the steps and behind the Desoto. "Fuck" he yelled again, this time in anger as another Boer barreled out of the cabin and had his face filleted by two bursts from his pistol. There was a sudden crash, then a boom, and Esco saw the dildo come sailing over the back of the house, try to land on the edge of the roof, topple. The black wasp buzzed overhead and a thin silver line traced out and down into the bushes next to the cabin, a sharp grunt as the wasp emptied its battery through the line as a taser-shot before dropping into the bushes. The leads tangled and it caught, hanging suspended, rocking slightly eight feet in the air.

A rock caught Esco just above the eye. The first Boer had crept around the other side of the Desoto and thrown a rock at him. Good shot, too. A little further back and he would have been down, thought Esco. As it was he was just pissed.

"A rock, man?" he asked, dancing backwards and slipping slightly on the crushed gravel of the drive. His balance was off.

"Pretty fucking unprofessional" he said before another rock caught him in the elbow. That throw was good, and his arm went suddenly numb followed by a flaring pain. Probably broke the bone, thought Esco, noting with disappointment that he'd dropped the gun as he staggered. He had the good sense to duck before the next rock whistled by his head. He lunged for the pistol, vertigo turning it into a dive as the Boer appeared running breakneck around the front of the truck.

The Boer hit first, and Esco's finger stubbed hard against the flechette's barrel. He had one slow-mo view of the open end of the barrel swinging towards him, of staring down its length before it spun away from him under the truck. Then he was rolling, sweeping under the bulletproofing and to his feet before the Boer had a chance to get his hands on him. He sucked in breath, his ribs aching hard where he'd been kicked. Dust swirling across the yard, drifting slowly away from the two of them and the side of the truck. Esco regarded the Boer through the open car window.

"We don't got to do this" he said between clenched teeth.

The Boer didn't say anything, his lips pressed hard together. The flechette had torn a gaping hole in his shirt, and Esco could see the farmer's tan, the line on the man's shoulder where dark tanned flesh turned to pasty white. His arm was peppered with twisted shards of ceramic, blood oozing around rapidly purpling flesh. The Boer's sandy brown hair flickered lightly as a breeze kicked up. The dust went flat, sheeted away from them for a moment and the Boer kicked the door, hard. Esco danced back and out of the way, one arm useless, up on his toes now. Esco looked pretty and could talk nice, but he'd trained hard at boxing every day of his life and it was for this reason that he'd made as good as he had with Pharoe Munch.

He danced back and forth, moving slightly away from the truck, lifting his good arm to cover his face. He nodded, slightly, getting his head into the rhythm. The Boer circled past the door, bending his knees deep, his right arm wide, out from his body. Esco feinted, judging his opponent's responses, skipped a pace or two towards the cabin to get the sun out of his eyes. He smiled, slightly. The Boer had kept the truck to his left, refused to get pulled out from the sun at his back. Esco stilled slightly, weaving, bobbing, counting combos, letting his eyes blur as he watched the motion, not the man.

The Boer bent, scooped up a hand of gravel and hurled it at him as he simultaneously dove forward, his one good hand reaching for Esco's face. Esco's fist deflected most of the gravel but a handful of dirt filled his nose and eyes as he struck, sidestepping and ducking together, his fist snapping into the Boer's face and out, his shoulder peeling back as he slid to one side. He danced back, shaking his head, blinking furiously to get the grit out of his eyes. Vision swam into place through watery eyes and he saw the Boer was down, face down, not moving in the swirling dust of the yard.

Later they'd find out that he'd broken the man's nose, driven it upwards into his brain. It was a great shot, though Esco didn't like to think how much of it must have been luck. They'd slit the throat of the guy Baby had tasered, but ignored the Boer who'd come out the back. He'd drowned by the time they'd found him, his face stuck in three inches of filthy seep. Baby's pink flier had dumped a powder bomb on him and he'd fallen, paralyzed, into a muddy pool in the back of the cabin.

The Frenchman was alive, if barely. He had a nasty case of heatstroke and Esco and Baby had a hell of a time getting him to get into the truck next to the big gun. The sedatives Pharoe had given them did the trick, though, and they were able to wrap him in cool packs and get some water into him before he passed out. Then they'd done a clean sweep of the cabin, wired it up with explosives, and dropped the bodies in the battery barrels. Baby set a timer on the explosives so the bodies would have time to decompose in the acid before it went off. They left. Esco's arm was starting to really hurt now, and he was eager to get to a doctor.

"Nice work back there" said Baby, his viewport back on now and wired to the truck, driving by joystick as he sat behind the wheel. It was weird to see the wheel move by itself, Baby leaning back from it.

"It always happens so fast, know what I mean?" said Esco. "Just do what you know how to do, hope it comes out. Got to believe this one was lucky, man."

"They're all lucky, Esco."

"Hey" said Esco, lighting himself another cigarette with his good arm, "I was just scared he was gonna go for my face."