Technobabel (22 page)

"Who are you? What do you want from me?"

"You’ve already figured out most of it for yourself. I want the information Renraku sent you to find, the secret of your amazing abilities. I also want details on who you took your orders from in Renraku and anything else you know about the company and its operations. In short, I want everything."

"And if I
refuse,
what? You’ll drug me again? Try to torture me again?"

The man’s face darkened and he suddenly sprang forward, like a stalking cat on a cornered mouse. The Hispanic woman gasped and stepped back as the man grabbed the front of Babel’s thin shirt and held his face so close Babel could feel the heat of his breath.

"I will, if you force me to," he said in a low voice. "Make no mistake, boy, you have something I need and I will get it from you however I can. You’ve proven that simulated interrogation scenarios won’t work on you, but there are other means, real and very painful means, I can use to extract information. By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be begging to tell me anything I want to know. I’ve already proven that pain can be an excellent stimulus to the memory, haven’t I... Michael?"

The sound of his other name made Babel jump a bit.

"Oh yes, Mama sold me your name. A pity she didn’t share the rest of it. There are a lot of Michaels working for Renraku, but we’re working on a comparison." The man slowly released Babel’s shirt and rose up to his full height, adjusting the sleeves and front of his suit jacket.

"Believe it or not, I have no reason to hurt you unless you force me to. Just tell me what I want to know, and I’ll let you go. You don’t have to make this any harder on yourself." He held his gaze on Babel for a long moment, dark eyes on pale violet, before Babel finally spoke.

"Lanier," he said slowly. "Miles Lanier. I know you. You’re on the Renraku board. I saw your image many times on the corporate news channel. You’re playing a very dangerous game, Mr. Lanier."

Lanier’s jaw dropped for only an instant before composure covered his face like a cold mask.

Knowing
someone’s
name
gives
you
power
over
them,
Babel thought.
Let’s
see
if
that’s
true
. He only hoped he could find some way to get back to Renraku. He had to complete his mission. If Lanier was working for somebody else, as Babel suspected, then he had to make sure what he had for Renraku didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Lanier looked down at Babel for a few moments,
then
turned to the doctor hovering nearby. Babel never found out what Lanier was planning to do next because the lights in the room suddenly shifted to red. Then an alarm sounded and all hell broke loose.

16

Shadowrun n.
Any
movement,
action,
or
series
of
such
made
to
carry
out
illegal
or
quasi-legal
operations
.

—
World Wide WordWatch
, 2058 edition

Like a silver shadow, the gossamer-winged sprite skated through the glowing neon towers of the Boston Matrix. The gleaming chrome surface of her icon reflected the virtual light of the gridlines and other icons around her in sharp, twisted reflections, a testament to her programming skills. Here was a decker to be reckoned with. Other denizens of the Matrix would know the sprite’s markings and recognize her as a fellow predator, someone not to be fragged with. Those who did not have the wisdom to see her for what she was weren’t likely to see her at all. She was a shadow, a ghost in the machine.

As Ariel sped through the telecommunications grid of the metroplex toward the Mandala Technologies system, she hoped the price her team had paid Milo for the local telecom number she was using was worth it. Her scanner programs were online and sending out invisible feelers along her path, prepared to warn her of any hidden dangers or software traps she might encounter. Ariel found her pulse rate increasing, the pre-run adrenaline surge starting to hit her. This was what most deckers lived for: the rush of preparing to break into a protected system, to test their skill against the skill of the programmers who’d built the system’s defenses and to lay their lives on the line that their skill and their hottest programs could beat the defenders’ skills and their coldest ice.
A game with the highest stakes around.

With a blur of movement through the datastreams, Ariel arrived at her destination. In the real world, her cyberdeck connected with the LTG number she had entered, and her passcode programs went to work to provide the key to open the door Ariel needed to get through. There was a tense moment where she was uncertain if the programs would work, or if the system would recognize her as an intruder and send out an alert. Bits and alphanumeric characters flashed before her eyes in the virtual world of cyberspace as the two systems negotiated and haggled back and forth before Ariel was able to step into the back door of the target system. She breathed a sigh of relief and started looking around.

It had been a gamble, but it paid off. Ariel’s first scouting of the Mandala host system had made it abundantly clear that it was possible to get in. Ariel was proud of her skills as a decker, but she knew her limits. She was one of the best ice-breakers in the biz, but there was no way she was getting inside a system that looked to be protected by some of the best Fuchi had to offer. Fuchi was
the
corporation when it came to Matrix technology, and their ice was some of the best in the business.

Ariel told her boss that she’d never get in via the front door of the system without being detected. The only ice Ariel had ever seen that was worse was the kind Renraku Computer Systems had protecting some of
their
important hosts. Renraku had always been known for its cutting-edge ice, but lately their systems had been getting even smarter, a
lot
smarter. Adaptive architectures, cascading party ice, the worst. Word on the street said Renraku’s best systems couldn’t be broken, and even legendary deckers like Fastjack and Black Isis had tried and failed against them. Fortunately, Ariel didn’t have to worry about Renraku ice on this run.

"Trouble, this is Hammer,"
came
a voice out of nowhere. "We’re en route, ETA eight minutes.
Report."

Ariel took a quick look around the room her icon appeared in. It looked like a fairly standard host-system, no fancy sculpting of the virtual architecture, very little code wasted on fancy images or psychological warfare. That probably meant the system was keyed for some serious main-line defense without any frills. Ariel had to be ready for blasters, tar pits, corroding programs, and possibly worse.

"Trouble here," she replied, the cybernetic link of her cyberdeck translating her thoughts into transmissions on the team’s tacticom radio band. "I’m in.
Beginning search through the system for access to security and internal surveillance.
Stand by."

"Roger that," the deep voice replied. "Keep me apprised."

Ariel activated a scanner program to check and see what kind of access the host had to the building’s systems. The access she’d used to penetrate was a secondary system, a back door put in by a programmer eager to earn nuyen selling access to people willing to pay, and the Hammermen had paid handsomely. It wasn’t nearly as good as access to the main system, but it would have to do.

Ariel’s scanning program appeared in a glittering cloud of dust, becoming a tall mirror set in a gilt oval frame. The surface flowed and shimmered like quicksilver as the program linked with the host’s diagnostic and status subroutines and fed the information into Ariel’s cyberdeck. The system specs started to appear on the surface of the mirror in glowing characters, and Ariel scrolled through them quickly, stopping to check a few items on the long list for anything she could use in her mission. Good, the system was primarily concerned with environmental control within the building, but there were some connections between the environmental systems and the main building controller; feedback loops and other access points to allow the building’s systems to work harmoniously together. It would have to be enough.

The connections between the systems contained command pathways that system administrators and maintenance personnel could use to cross-link systems and perform upgrades and repair work simultaneously without having to leave their cushy offices. With the right command codes, Ariel could set up a similar link to allow her access to the important parts of the main host—the security systems and internal sensors—without having to go through the glacial layer of ice protecting the systems from intrusion from the outside. The trick was setting up the right dummy codes without putting the system on alert to her presence.

With a wave of her icon’s slim, silvery hand, a long, tapering wand appeared. Ariel tweaked the programming on the code-breaker she’d designed, checking some of the system specs to make sure everything matched up correctly. Then she sent the command.
Open
sesame
!
she
thought as she waved the silver wand, trailing a sparkling cloud of fairy dust behind it. The sparkling motes of code infused themselves into the blank gray walls of the room where her icon stood, and her cyberdeck began to execute a flurry of algorithms and program instructions at incredible speed, too fast for the human mind to even begin to follow.

In the space of a few seconds, the two systems wrestled over the access codes to the command pathways, and the battle was decided. Before Ariel’s eyes, the glowing motes of fairy dust resolved themselves into a rectangular shape in the gray wall, which then broke away from the wall and swung open into the room, a doorway into the rest of the system.

Smiling to herself and keeping a tight rein on her impulse to leap directly through the access pathway, Ariel keyed her transmitter.

"Hammer, this is Trouble, I’ve got access.
Proceeding with Beta."

"Copy, Trouble. We are about seven minutes out." Ariel carefully checked the passage open before her. All of her systems had probed and scanned the path, and found it safe for her to travel. It was possible the pathway was some kind of trap, triggered by tampering with the command codes, but if it was,
then
it was too sophisticated for Ariel’s deck or her sharpened Matrix instincts to pick it up. She would be almost proud to be taken down by such a sophisticated defense mechanism.
Law
of
the
electron
jungle,
she thought as she stepped through the doorway.

The virtual passage led Ariel from the secondary host of the building to the central computer system. From here she could access all of the main systems of the target with only a minimal lag from the limited bandwidth of the back-door connection. While the limited pipeline to "squeeze" programs and commands was a problem, it was nothing compared to the difficulties of cutting through the ice protecting the main system from the outside. Ariel began a scan-assessment of the system just as she had from the access node. The silvery mirror reappeared and shimmered in the air as the system’s specs scrolled across it.

Mirror,
mirror
on
the
wall,
who’s
the
best
decker
in
the
sprawl?
Ariel thought to herself with a grin. Her eyes widened at the sight of the security specifications on the system.
Holy
ghost
,
it
would
have
taken
a
blow
torch
to
cut
through
that
much
ice
. The rest of the specs were equally impressive. Apparently the Mr. Johnson had known what he was talking about when he said the target site had some very sophisticated systems running on it. The facility’s computing power was way out of spec for what Ariel knew of Mandala Technologies. They were an up and coming software corp, but their ice was some of Fuchi’s best. Mandala must be working on something requiring a lot of computer horsepower, which meant cutting-edge tech, which translated to nuyen for Ariel.

She was sorely tempted to scan through the databanks for files that might contain valuable paydata she could sell on the underground market—Milo and some other fixers were always willing to fence good hot data—but Ariel was a professional and paydata wasn’t what she’d been hired to find. She had a team depending on her. She hadn’t let them down yet and she wasn’t going to start now.

The
remainder of the security specs were
online, and Ariel breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of them. The security in the facility was top of the line, but it was still controlled by the central computer and the security subroutines. Many corporations, understanding the potential vulnerability of their systems to invasions like the one Ariel was carrying out, had moved away from trusting their computer systems to safeguard their important installations. Advances in human-machine interface allowed human operators to take the role of central controller for a security system, plugging into the security grid and in effect "becoming" the building. They "felt" all of the input of the security sensors through a closed-circuit simsense feed, and they could "move" any of the building’s security systems as easily as raising an arm to swat a fly. Best of all, such systems were virtually impregnable to decker subversion because the human operator could recognize nuances no computer could match, and the two operating systems were largely incompatible.