He felt dazed. As if he weren’t in enough shit already. Don’t these guys ever give up? They’d already had their shot at him. Time to give the rest of the world a turn.
“How long ago? I mean, how long ago did it go through the Fair?”
“Don’t know, exactly – might’ve been four, five, maybe six hours ago. And it was making tracks, by all reports. Those big megs can really move.”
Axxter wondered if it was the same one that he’d done the graffex designs on; Cripplemaker’s commission. It’d appeal to the warriors’ sense of irony for him to get squashed by the megassassin bearing his own work. The last thing he’d see would be the emblem he’d designed himself. It’d be like getting killed by your own signature.
Brevis’s voice rattled on. “That’s what I mean, Ny. You gotta get moving. It’s got you pinpointed by the location of the jack you’ve been using. The longer you hang around there, or anywhere nearby, the sooner it’s going to be on your ass.”
“Christ…”
“Look, just get away from there. Any direction’s fine; but just go. I’ll do what I can from this end – maybe I can find out what direction the meg’ll be coming in – but everything else you’re going to have to figure out on the run. Okay? And give me a call when you find some place just as far from where you’re at as you can make it.”
When the first gray half-light oozed around him, the plug-in jack with its yellow marking rings was already beyond sighting, hidden by the curve of the building. His progress had been slow in the dark, clambering blind, his chest close to the wall, only the pithons sure about striking out for new holds.
He paused to catch his breath; his heart had been hammering in his throat the whole distance. Brevis’s panic had infected him, locking into his spinal column. Take it easy – he could make it if he just kept a steady pace, kept traveling. Maybe he could. If he could reach the entry site to the interior, the tunnel opening he’d calculated… then he might have a chance.
His pulse had slowed with the light; trying to move in the dark had spooked him. Too much like running in nightmares, where there was no sign of motion at all. He filled his lungs, nostrils stinging with the chill air, and reached out for another handhold.
He heard the whistle of the cable reeling out before it hit him. Across the shoulderblades, knocking him flat up against the wall – then he was jerked back by an arm around his throat.
“Don’t move, sucker.” The voice snarled at his ear. A woman’s voice; he’d heard it before. Something pointed dug through his jacket toward his ribs. The sensation ended, simultaneous with the appearance of a shining knifeblade close to his face. “Get the picture? Be smart.”
The woman shifted her weight off his back. He turned his head to look at her.
She sat in a loop knotted in the cable, dangling alongside him. A kid, younger than he, with dark hair cropped short. She looked him over, her level gaze traveling from his boots upward.
“You’re not a circuit rider.” She used the point of the knife to scratch the side of her face. “I can tell. You should be over on the other side. What’re you doing here?”
The voice that had broken in on his hollow-time call; now confronting him in the flesh. “You know, you don’t need to wave that thing around.” The blade annoyed him. “You want to know something, you can just ask.”
She smiled and tucked the knife into her belt. “I thought you were one of that D:Fex bunch. I’ve got it in for ’em.” She leaned back against the wall. “So what’s the deal – you trying to get back over to the morningside? Is that it?”
“You’ve heard about me?”
The woman shook her head. “What you people do is no concern of mine. I’ve got other business to take care of. I wouldn’t’ve come around here at all if you hadn’t been using part of my network.”
“Your network?” He remembered some of the things she’d said before, when she’d just been a voice on the line. “Was that that M something or other?”
“M:Pulse. Yeah, that’s it.”
“So you’re, uh, Felonious.”
“Felony. Sometimes; most of the time, actually. When I’m not something else.”
Axxter glanced up the wall, along the length of the cable. He could see where it emerged from a peeled-back section of the wall, just large enough for someone to wriggle through. Work on this one – anybody who had working knowledge of things like that was worth cultivating.
“You’re a line-ghost?”
“‘Line-ghost’ – give me a break.” She looked at him disgustedly. “Line-ghosts are just phenomena, like static or something. They’re just echoes on the wire. You should be able to tell the difference between a ghost and a circuit rider.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “So, uh, what’s a circuit rider?”
A pitying smile. “Circuit riders are people like me, people who can do things. Do things with the wires, man. We’re into the systems. People like you, you make a call, you go over the wire, through the grid, little dot-dot-dots moving along. But you’re like a rat that’s got its way through the maze memorized; all you see are the little walls in front of your rat nose. The trick is to get above the maze, get your hands on it, make it do what you want.”
“I get you.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You mean phone phreaking. Hacking and stuff.”
“Hey, fuck you, man.” Felony seemed genuinely offended. “Don’t give me that. That’s ancient stuff – people were doing that shit before the War. Those punks, that D:Fex bunch and the other network families, they can waste their time that way if they want to; gaming each other and breaking into restricted access files and kid shit like that. I’ve got more important business to take care of. I’ve got territory.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Keep her talking.
“I’ll tell you what it means. It means I don’t have to band together with a bunch of other circuit riders, just to have somebody to watch my ass while I’m out working the wires. M:Pulse is a lone-wolf network, fella; it’s nobody but me.” A broad smile accompanied the swagger in her voice. “I got circuits that nobody can get on except me. That was why I got so pissed when I found you on that line, making your call. I don’t handle encroachment well, it just burns me up, man. Those wires are mine.”
He figured she was referring to some part of the phone grid running through the building. Out here, in the middle of nowhere. “So what makes them yours? Just because nobody else uses them?”
Felony shook her head, still smiling. “No, man, it’s more than that; a lot more. I’ve cracked the interface; I was born able to do it, I just had to learn how much I could do. And I can do anything on the wires. I mean, anybody can get into the wires – that’s what having a terminal inside your head is all about. The trick is to get back out and come up inside somebody else’s head. When you can do that, there ain’t shit that can stop you.”
She really was just a kid, he realized. Easy enough to bait her into bragging about stuff like that. That was what living on ‘the wires,’ as she put it, spending your whole existence messing about inside a maze of electronic circuits, did to you. Nothing but games, a sealed Peter Pan existence. Everybody, on the vertical or the horizontal, knew of that little world just on the other side of the phone. You could dabble your toe in it easily enough – there was always a standing invitation to ‘come in and play,’ more kid mentality – with the accompanying risk of getting your whole head sucked in. And spending the rest of your life there, your body a vestigial organ in reality, the real you stripped down to the infantile wiggle on the circuits, looking for fun among the electrons.