We had a couple of weeks.
Ortega flew north-east. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the encampment.
“You know this place?”
“Places like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the centre? They’ve got it webbed into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single figure percentage of all the data crime on the West Coast.”
“They never get busted?”
“Depends.” Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest bubblefabs. “The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is small-scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division have got bigger discs to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?”
I climbed out and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the bubblefabs were all painted with brightly coloured pictures or abstract patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the ‘fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges and in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines between the buildings and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.
Camp security met us inside the first ring of ‘fabs. He stood over two metres tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves put together. Beneath loose grey coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter. His eyes were a startling red and short horns sprouted from his temples. Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.
He nodded at me.
“You Anderson?”
“Yes. This is Kristin Ortega.” I was surprised how flat the name suddenly sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.
That, and my memories.
I wondered if she was feeling the same.
“Cop, huh?” The ex-freak fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth, but it didn’t sound too hostile either.
“Not at the moment,” I said firmly. “Is Irene here?”
“Yeah.” He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. “The ‘fab with the stars on it. Been expecting you.”
As he spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose grey was startlingly offset by a violently-coloured rainbow headband.
“Your visitors,” said the horned man. “You OK with this?”
Elliott nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.
“You’d better come inside,” she said.
Inside the bubblefab, the utilitarian space had been sectioned off with wooden partitions and woven rugs hung from wires set in the plastic dome. Walls were covered in more artwork, most of which looked as if it had been contributed by the children of the camp. Elliott took us to a softly lit space set with lounging bags and a battered-looking access terminal on a hinged arm epoxied to the wall of the bubble. She seemed to have adjusted well to the sleeve, and her movements were smoothly unselfconscious. I’d noticed the improvement on board the Panama Rose in the early hours of the morning, but here it was clearer. She lowered herself easily into one of the loungers and looked speculatively up at me.
“That’s you inside there, Anderson, I presume?”
I inclined my head.
“You going to tell me why?”
I seated myself opposite her. “That depends on you, Irene. Are you in or out?”
“You guarantee I get my own body back.” She was trying hard to sound casual, but there was no disguising the hunger in her voice. “That’s the deal?”
I glanced up at Ortega, who nodded. “That’s correct. If this comes off successfully, we’ll be able to requisition it under a federal mandate. But it has to be successful. If we fuck up, we’ll probably all go down the double barrel.”
“You are operating under a federal brief, lieutenant?”
Ortega smiled tightly. “Not exactly. But under the UN charter, we’ll be able to apply the brief retrospectively. If, as I said, we are successful.”
“A retrospective federal brief.” Elliott looked back to me, brows raised. “That’s about as common as whalemeat. This must be something gigantic.”
“It is,” I said.
Elliott’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re not with JacSol any more, are you? Who the fuck are you, Anderson?”
“I’m your fairy godmother, Elliott. Because if the lieutenant’s requisition doesn’t work out, I’ll buy your sleeve back. That’s a guarantee. Now are you in, or are you out?”
Irene Elliott hung on to her detachment for a moment longer, a moment in which I felt my technical respect for her take on a more personal tone. Then she nodded.
“Tell me,” she said.
I told her.
It took about half an hour to lay it out, while Ortega stood about or paced restlessly in and out of the bubblefab. I couldn’t blame her. Over the past ten days she’d had to face the breakdown of practically every professional tenet she owned, and she was now committed to a project that, if it went wrong, offered a bristling array of hundred-year or better storage offences for all concerned. I think, without Bautista and the others behind her, she might not have risked it, even with her cordial hatred of the Meths, even for Ryker.
Or maybe I just tell myself that.
Irene Elliott sat and listened in silence broken only by three technical queries to which I had no answers. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long time. Ortega stopped her pacing and came to stand behind me, waiting.
“You’re insane,” said Elliott finally.
“Can you do it?”
She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her face went dreamy, and I guessed she was reviewing a previous Dipping episode from memory. After a few moments she snapped back and nodded as if she might be trying to convince herself.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It can be done, but not in real time. This isn’t like rewriting your fightdrome friends’ security system, or even downloading into that AI core. This makes what we did to the AI look like a systems check. To do this, to even attempt this, I’ve got to have a virtual forum.”
“That’s not a problem. Anything else?”
“That depends on what counter-intrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.” Disgust, and an edge of tears coloured her tone for a couple of instants. “You say this is a high-class whorehouse?”
“Very,” said Ortega.
Elliott’s feelings went back underground. “Then I’ll have to run some checks. That’ll take time.”
“How much time?” Ortega wanted to know.
“Well, I can do it two ways.” Professional scorn surfaced in her voice, scarring over the emotion that had been there before. “I can do a fast scan and maybe ring every alarm aboard this prick in the sky. Or I can do it right, which’ll take a couple of days. Your choice. We’re running on your clock.”