Red Wraith smiled at the irony that here, in hell, someone should be walking on "water." He laughed at the fleeting thought that this woman might be his savior. Most days, it was hard enough for him to trust himself, let alone a complete stranger.
The tunnel was just high enough for them to walk upright, and just wide enough that Red Wraith could reach out his hands on either side and touch the irregular, weeping rock walls. Or rather, try to touch them. His hands passed through them each time his fingers brushed them, making him wonder if he was ever going to be able to manipulate anything in this system. As an experiment, he reached out and touched Lady Death's back as they were rounding a bend in the tunnel. His hand passed through both the fabric of her kimono and her skin, but if she felt his touch she gave no sign.
The screams of the inhabitants of the larger cavern faded away, and were replaced by the rustle of the Japanese woman's kimono and the gentle gurgle and drip of the stream of blood.
They walked at a normal pace; there was none of the sense of rushing motion or instantaneous travel from node to node that deckers in the Matrix usually experienced. Despite the fact that he seemed to have no solid form, Red Wraith inhabited this landscape as if it were a physical reality, rather than a Matrix construct. And that worried him. He'd heard of systems like this, but had never accessed one before. Known as ultraviolet hosts, they were supposed to have system ratings far in excess of even megacorp or military computer systems. On an ultraviolet host system, the decker was his persona. Which would explain Red Wraith's ghostlike inability to manipulate objects and his complete disassociation from his meat bod. Except that ultraviolet hosts were supposed to be just a rumor…
After a few moments the tunnel ended in a large cavern that was filled with a vast red lake. Metallic-skinned bodies dotted its surface, floating on their backs with arms and legs loosely splayed. They turned slowly, as if trapped in lazy whirlpools. Each figure was a smooth metallic humanoid-the standard USM iconography for a decker's persona. Across the lake, Red Wraith could make out a dark opening where the tunnel they had been following continued.
Red Wraith and the Japanese woman stood on a beach of gray dust studded with bone-white pebbles. Just ahead of them, a black-hulled wooden boat was beached, its bow pulled up on shore. It looked much like a gondola, with a long, single oar at the stern, a curved bow, and a seat for passengers in the middle. Standing on the raised stern was a figure shrouded entirely in black. Pale skeletal hands gripped the oar. The figure turned, slowly, staring at the two newcomers with a face that was no more than an empty shadow under a hood of cloth.
"It looks as though he's waiting for passengers," Red Wraith whispered to his companion. He gestured toward the boat. "Should we risk a ride?"
"Omakase shimasu-it's up to you," she answered. "I have no idea where we are." She kicked a pebble into the lake and watched silently as ripples spread outward from it in a perfect square.
That made Red Wraith pause. "No?" he asked. "But I thought you'd played this game before."
"You think this is a game?" she asked. Her voice bordered on shrill. "If it is, I'm not interested in playing any more!" she shouted at the cavern ceiling. "I just want to go home!"
"Shut up!" he hissed at her. "Do you want to alert every IC program on the system to the fact that we're here?"
Her lower lip curved into a pout. "I thought you were going to help me."
"We've got to help each other," he told her. He paused. "You really don't know where we are?"
She shook her head.
Red Wraith sighed. So much for that faint hope. "I have no idea, either. But from the feel of this place, I'd guess we've blundered into an ultraviolet host of some sort. And that requires a supercomputer of incredible processing power-one capable of handling megapulses of data."
The other decker's eyes brightened. "I have heard of those," she said. "According to the data I've scanned on the shadowfiles network, an ultraviolet host requires an artificial intelligence to operate and maintain it. Imagine- we could meet an actual Al here…"
"Nonsense," Red Wraith broke in sharply. "A sufficiently powerful processing complex might spontaneously develop an ultraviolet host without any input from its operators, and that might lead them to believe an Al was at work, somewhere behind the scenes. But true Als don't exist-the closest anyone's come is a semi-autonomous knowbot with random-decision pathway capacities. Even the megacorps are still years away from developing anything with enough code to enable self-programming in response to new data. Every decker knows that."
"Ha! You think you know everything?" She flung out a hand to point at the gondola. "Then tell me what that is, sensei."
Red Wraith stared at the Japanese woman. A suspicion was dawning. "How old are you?" he asked.
"Old enough to know as much about decking as you. Maybe more."
A realization struck him: this decker was much younger than he was. He'd been trusting to some kid to lead him around. He'd assumed, since she'd been in the cavern before he arrived, that she knew more about this system than he did. Now he knew better. He wouldn't make that mistake again.
He glanced at the gondola. The hooded figure at the oar hadn't moved; it seemed to be waiting patiently for them. Red Wraith deliberately turned his back on the girl, walked to the boat, and climbed aboard. The padded seat supported him when he sat down, even though his hands ghosted through it. Perhaps because he expected it to?
But the one thing he couldn't do was access the data he had fought so hard to download-the UCAS military personnel file that was his first step in tracking down Lydia. It seemed that only the active memory of his cyberdeck was usable-he could still run his utilities, but the storage memory to which data files were downloaded remained inaccessible to him. Worry gnawed at him-he could only hope that the chips hadn't been fried, that the data he'd taken such pains to access was still there.
The shrouded figure in the stern stood utterly still, as if it were an icon waiting to be activated. Realizing what it wanted, Red Wraith accessed a simple utility he used for on-line payments. He chose an icon that represented a basic unit of ten nuyen and pushed the symbol toward the ferryman. As the icon was absorbed into a fold in the robe of the hooded figure, the ferryman leaned against his oar, and the gondola slid away from shore. As it did, the girl in the kimono looked once behind her and then wrung her hands. "Wait!" she called out, then ran to the boat across the lake and clambered aboard.
"You're not leaving me behind!" she told Red Wraith firmly as she settled onto the seat beside him. She kept a wary eye on the shrouded figure in the stern.
Red Wraith nodded. "All right. But if we're going to get out of here, we have to work together. We need to figure out where the hub of this system is. And that means knowing how we entered it. What system were you accessing before this one?"
The girl-which was how Red Wraith thought of her now, even though her icon suggested a mature woman- eyed him with a guilty expression, as if being asked to confess something.
"A manga music fansite."
"A what music?"
"Figures you wouldn't know," the girl muttered.
The figure in the stern worked the oar back and forth, rippling the water and propelling the boat forward with soft splashes.
"Manga," Lady Death said slowly, as if explaining something obvious to someone stupid, "is cartoon illusion. Manga music is-"
"I get it," Red Wraith said. "What was its LTG address?"