"That thing giving you trouble?"
"Please," said Mark, sounding tired. "If you see the man who invented technology, send him up. I have something for him." He stood up from under the hood and made an eloquent fist. "I just can't get this thing's armor to stay solid when it should." He sighed, straightened up. "There's always the possibility that I've found a bug in the programming language itself… but I really don't want to believe that. It would be big trouble… "
The desk wasn't too far away, and Charlie saw the Magic Jacket lying over it as he had left it much earlier. "Is it okay?" he said.
"It was fine," Mark said. "I 'looked' in on you five or six times, just to check on it. No problems." He looked at Charlie, with a rather challenging expression. "Except with you. You didn't seem terribly comfortable down there."
"I hate it, the whole fake-seeming business," Charlie said. "Skulking and acting… I don't like not being me. Being me is hard enough, without having to fake being someone else as well." He let out a long breath. "But I guess this is in a good cause."
"You'd better believe it is," Mark said, "because you've had a trip."
Charlie swallowed. "What? Already? When?"
"Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, actually. Someone unauthorized was trying to get into your space. I tried to get hold of you, but you were offline."
"Whew," Charlie said. "I wasn't expecting anything that fast." He thought for a moment. "Mark, that means that whoever tripped the 'wire' has definitely been reading the message boards in Deathworld. I didn't actually talk to anybody until this morning, real early, before school."
"How many people have you talked to?"
"Uh, six or seven. A couple have seemed interested in me… but I'm not entirely sure yet that it's more than casual. I should get a better idea later."
"Okay. Well, you're recording everything… "
"I never take off the magic jacket… no matter how much it itches."
"It doesn't itch!"
"It does. It fizzes. I feel like I'm wearing a can of soda." "Must be feedback through the implant," Mark said, thoughtful.
"Can't you do something about it?"
"Not while you're wearing it," Mark said. "Let me play with it today if I have some time. I'll leave it in your space when I'm done with it."
"Yeah, fine. But Mark, who tripped the wire?!" "I don't know."
"You don't know? I thought you put a trace on the trip wire routine!"
"I did," Mark said, sounding extremely annoyed now, "but unfortunately, your pigeon was using an anonymizer to conceal the server of origin. They're perfectly legal. I thought the routine I had running would beat it… but this `anonner' is a new one, just opened up. Among the identification routines it's been built to defeat is the one I was using. Dammit."
"But can't you use something… you know… from Net Force?"
Mark's voice got, if possible, even more annoyed. "The `industrial strength' identification routines at Net Force are locked down tight, Charlie… to get permission to use the 'Drano' utilities, you have to have a court order and ID as a senior Net Force supervisor. Which I am not… yet. And I can't exactly ask any of them, either. So I'm winging it, using routines that have a lot less oomph. If I want to upgrade one of those to industrial strength I'm going to have to do that myself. In fact that's what I'll have to do after school today go check out this new anonymizer, find out which protocols it's using, figure out how to defeat them. Probably take me a day or so. You better sit the next couple dances out until I can sensitize the 'trip wire' to backtrack the next hit correctly."
Charlie was fuming. "You don't know anything about where the 'trip' came from?"
"Not a thing," Mark said, sounding just as annoyed. "Could have been next door to you, or in Ulan Bator."
Charlie sighed. "Okay," he said. "Let me know when you get the new routine up again."
"I will. But look, Charlie, just give it all a rest for the moment. A day or so won't make any difference."
"Yeah…" Charlie headed out of the VAB and back to his own space, beginning now to be actively nervous. A day or so… But no matter what Mark said, Charlie couldn't get rid of the idea that it could matter. It most definitely could…
Chapter 8
Nick looked for Charlie at school that day but missed him at lunch again, and wasn't able to track him down between classes. He had things on his mind, and he really wanted to talk to Charlie about them.
His last-period class had been canceled, so Nick stopped by the wing of the school where he knew Charlie sometimes had a late upper-level biology class. But it had been relocated or rescheduled-the room was locked and empty. Nick let out an exasperated breath and started to walk home.
His path took him by the NetAccess center as usual, and there Nick paused by the door and took out the last commcard he had left, the one he had fished out of his bottom drawer in his bedroom several days earlier, having forgotten that it was there in the first place. Nick looked at the card and sighed. He was woefully short of cash, now there wouldn't be any more allowance money until Friday, and this was only Tuesday. Yet at the same time he wanted to give Charlie the opportunity to walk through Deathworld with a friend at his side, not only for enjoyment, but now, after his conversation with Khasm and Spile, for security as well.
And there were other matters on his mind. A random thought, something about the various lifts he had brought back from Deathworld with him, had been obsessing Nick for the past couple of days. The Eighth Circle was proving difficult to crack-and it's gonna be impossible, without some more money to spend some more time there, Nick thought. But he was noticing that the hints and whispers he had been expecting from "plants" in the Circle had been very few. He had been wandering around in those stony tunnels and up and down the Escheresque stairways for days now and had come up against-he smiled wryly at the expression-a stone wall.
Yet there had been more lifts available than usual, so many that his pocket lift carrier couldn't handle them all anymore, and Nick had to load them in and out of the storage area in his public server. Most of them were different versions of songs Nick already had lifts of. Only a collector, an aficionado, or a raving completist would feel the need to have them all. But Nick certainly fitted into the last category, at least, and it was while he was listening to some of the "alternate" versions in bed a few nights ago that he had noticed some of the lifts were alternates in other ways as well. They had lyrics that other versions of the songs didn't have-
He shook his head and went into the access center. "Hey, Nick," the guy behind the front counter said. "Early today-"
"Yeah, well, you might not see me for a few days," Nick said. "Running out of green…" He slapped the commcard up onto the reader plate.
"You're okay," said Dilish, the guy behind the counter. "Got a couple of hours left on that one."
"That much? Super! My usual one open?"
"No, there's someone in there, take Eight… I'll reroute your server info over there."
Nick went back to the booth and closed himself in, locking the sliding door and sitting down in the implant chair. A moment later he was standing in the usual white space, and he got up and reached into his pocket, coming up with the key that "remembered" his location from the last visit.
"Deathworld access," Nick said. The door in the air opened, a black rectangle in all that whiteness, and the copyright notice began rolling by. Is it an illusion, he wondered, or does that thing actually get longer every time? Finally it vanished, and Nick went through into the dimness of the Dark Artificer's Keep, entering into the dark stone corridor where he had been standing when he last exited.