Dodger opened his eyes. Usually there was nothing to watch while decking. His gaze drifted to where his companion’s fingers tapped codewords into the Allegiance cyberdeck. Dodger’s fingers tapped an identical sequence on his own Fairlight deck. When Sam’s fingers ceased their frantic motion, Dodger’s hit one more key and the sequence was locked into storage on his deck.
Part of the price, he thought. The passgate was too valuable a piece of data to be denied him by Sam’s scruples. He refocused his full attention on the Matrix.
They entered the Renraku complex into a backwater slave module that was overseer for a bank of elevators. Such a node should not have allowed access to the system but it was, after all, a back door. The appearance was that of a small guardroom. Its smooth walls flashed infrequently with light as the elevators went about their business. A samurai dozed in one corner of the imaginary room, his neon armor dull. Because the elevators only connected a small spread of floors in areas of minimum security, the guardian ice would normally be activated only in an alert.
The run suddenly looked a lot more feasible. If Renraku had really been in an uproar over a major tech theft, the entire system would be on alert. Even here, the guard would be awake to watch the physical elevators and to report intruders to security. Such a monitor assignment was usually considered superfluous in such an unimportant node, but the presence of guardian ice was an indication of the thoroughness of the Renraku Matrix. At least that was the most reasonable conclusion if one assumed that Matrix security didn’t know about the back door. Dodger didn’t think such ignorance likely. He certainly wouldn’t want to bet his brain on it.
Though the guard was asleep and everything seemed peaceful, it might still be a trap. If their own programs weren’t successfully hiding their identities, the countermeasure programming might be sophisticated enough to present a pacific image until the intruding deckers could be drawn so deep into the system that escape was impossible. Corporate deckers could already be jacking in to hunt them down, or a tracer might be back-tracking their signal to detect their physical location prior to targeting a strike team.
Dodger hadn’t survived years as a shadowrunning decker without caution. But he had some experience with this particular corporate Matrix and he found nothing to indicate that all was not as it seemed. Somewhat assured, he signaled Sam to press on.
Sam leading, they left the elevator control node and stepped out onto the ethereal pathways that connected the components of the internal Matrix. In the infinite darkness, subsystems glowed like distant stars of arcane geometry. while pulses of data blazed comet-like across those subjective heavens. Before and behind them, their own path faded away, leaving them walking an insubstantial flare of light that came from nowhere and went to nowhere, until they reached the next node.
During the transit, Dodger noticed that Sam’s icon limped. His brow furrowed as he tried to understand the phenomenon. He had seen nothing in the persona programming that indicated such a visual interpretation for the construct. Once the run was over, he would have to re-inspect the chips.
As the limping chrome mannikin led him through node after node, Dodger’s confidence grew. He began to feel assured that there really was no alert. They had only encountered one roving corporate decker and Dodger’s programs has masked them from him. If an alert were in progress, they wouldn’t have gone three nodes without bumping into some deckhound. This might be an easy run after all.
Finally, they reached Sam’s goal, a datastore for medical files on non-Human assets. When first told of it, Dodger had questioned the worth of such data to their quest. Would not personnel files, though harder to penetrate, be more useful in identifying whether the feathered serpent worked for Renraku? Sam had assured him that Renraku would classify a Dragon, even a sentient one, as an asset rather than an employee. The distinction was foolishness to Dodger, but then he wasn’t Japanese like Renraku’s directors. Orientals sometimes had different ideas about how the world worked. He’d seen enough of such skewed attitudes from Sally Tsung, and she was only half Oriental.
The walls of the datastore were aswirl with alphanumeric characters. Symbols flashed different colors and danced at varying speeds, the pattern complex and ever-shifting. The image represented the code systems locking the data away from unauthorized access. Sam’s icon stood transfixed. “I think you’d better handle this. I might trip an alarm.”
“Technomancy of the simplest sort. Keep watch.”
Dodgers icon dropped its mask and an ebon hand flourished a matte gold case. Slim fingers snapped open the lid and delicately removed a tool. Kneeling before the flickering wall of alphanumerics as though before a lock, Dodger inserted the slim instrument into the flow. After a few minute adjustments. he selected another tool, slipping it into the flow to use with the first. A careful twist of the wrist and the symbols slowed, their color pulses becoming longer. Another twist, and they slowed further and further, until they froze.
“Which file, Sir Corp?”
“I need to scan them.”
Sam’s icon stepped to the wall and placed a hand on the seemingly solid light. The chromed head bowed as if in deep concentration and file names flickered briefly as a fairy fire fled across them. After a minute, the glow steadied and highlighted one of them. “That one.”
The ebon boy nodded and adjusted the angles of his tools. The wall moved again, sequences rippling past until the chosen code lay under the position of his hands. He returned the tools to their case and it vanished under his cloak.
Dodger extended his hand into the wall. It disappeared into the light as if cut off at the wrist. After a moment, he withdrew it. He held a fat green book. Dodger flipped quickly through the pages. “No serpents.”
Sam sighed.
Dodger tossed the book back through the wall and tapped twice on the glowing file code. The alphanumerics of the wall resumed their manic rush, but their clarity was reduced.
“Dodger. I think we’d better get out of here.”
“What is it?’
“I don’t know. I just think that we might be pushing our luck if we stay.”
Dodger’s suspicions were roused by Sam’s sudden concern, an indication that he was withholding information. He reactivated his masking program. “Very well, but I’ll lead. We shall move faster that way.”
They did, indeed, move faster, retracing their route toward the exit, until Dodger pulled up suddenly. He gazed in shock at the walls of the node they had just entered. Vertical slabs of mirror reflected their icons to infinity. It was uncanny, unprecedented. What made it worse was that Dodger’s reflection showed the jet outline of a boy crouched under a shimmering cloak and the markings of Sam’s chromed mannikin were dark pittings in the smooth surface. Dodger felt uneasy. He had never encountered anything like this node in all his years of running the Matrix.
Fingers flew across the keyboard, improvising programs to analyze the nature of the hardware in which their programs were operating.