grey, the knobbly outlines of high-bandwidth antennae studding its flanks like barnacles on a whale. Or at least, these goggles have been programmed to
The convoy is past the gyratory and heading towards Queensferry Road way too fast, probably racking up speeding tickets at a rate best measured in euros per second. All the traffic lights are switching to green in front of you as the steering wheel twitches from side to side: Red info bubbles above anonymous grey roadside boxes inform you that they’ve been 0wnZ0red by the Royal Danish Air Force. You rest your hand on the wheel, and it shivers like a live animal. “What do you expect to find?” asks Liz. “And who is the adversary?”
“Hopefully, just a warehouse full of servers. Maybe a satellite dish or two.” Kemal is soothing. “I’d like nothing more than for this to be a false alert. In which case, we shall make our apologies, pay our speeding fines, and be on our way without further ado.”
Liz snorts. “That’ll be the day.” She reaches for her phone: “Now I’ve got to call the chief—”
“Not until we arrive. As I said, your terrestrial trunked radio network has been penetrated.”
ELAINE: Alone in the Dome
Despite the late-night chase through the darkened streets of the New Town, you sleep like a log and awake refreshed and ready to face a new day. You spend a brisk half-hour in the health suite, then shower and hit the hotel restaurant for some breakfast. Chris and the others have cut and run back to the big smoke already: Well, tough. You’ve got Jack and his magic code to give you some leads, and you’ve got access to Hayek’s offices, which is enough to be getting on with.
You’ve still got the office suite that Chris paid for, so you go down there and start going through the backlog of office email and project notes that have been building up since last Friday, when reality got put on hold for the duration. By twenty past nine your mood is sinking, and you’re mildly annoyed when you realize that Jack is late. So you text him, and get no reply—and no delivery notification.
With Jack off-line—and therefore no access to the results of his overnight trawl—you’re at a loose end. So you go out into the mezzanine and attempt to convince the coffee machine to give you something drinkable, and while you’re waiting for the bubbling and clanking to stop, you get an incoming call. From Jack, of course.
“Where’ve you been?” you demand.
“Sorry—I had to go to the police station. I got another nastygram, this time on paper: They wanted to examine it and look for prints.”
“Stuck in traffic, but I should be with you in about five minutes. I thought I should call ahead, though. The overnight run was mostly a success, and it found something interesting. There’s a likely-looking auction going on in one of the clearing-house sites; the stuff on sale looks to be an exact match for some of the stolen magic items. What makes it interesting is the ping latency to the current owner of the items—he’s in Glasgow. If we can get Hayek to twist Kensu’s arm into disclosing their customer contact details, we may be able to pay them a visit.”
“Oh, that’s
“Don’t know yet. See where the lead goes, I suppose…” Twenty minutes later you’re holed up in the office with Jack on the line, a couple of half-empty coffee cups and some half-baked theories. Wayne is being a pain: His phone insists he’s in a meeting and refuses to put your call through. But at least Jack’s got his lead. “The insurance claim request got fifty-one responses before I kicked back last night. I fed them in and set the spider running on the two largest auction sites that handle cross-game Zone trades. Twelve of the items turned up immediately, in a single stash that KingHorror9 is trying to shift. KingHorror9 is currently logged as active in Forgotten Futures, and a quick ping test suggests they’re local—latency is under ten milliseconds. So I think if we can get their name and address, we can go collar them immediately.”
“
Your phone butts in: “Mr. Richardson is holding. Do you want to talk to him?”
“Yeah, put him through.”
“What do you want now?” he begins. “Because I’m in a meeting—”
“We’ve got a lead on the stolen goods,” you tell him before he can wind up to hang up on you. “I need to pull the registration details of a user called KingHorror9, their true name and street address and so on. If you can you do that, we can go and pay them a visit right now.”
“Oh, let me just open a new stickie…”
Suddenly Wayne turns helpful. A minute later you’re off the phone with the distinct feeling that Progress is being Made, or at least an order has gone in to the production department, who are thinking about setting a delivery date sometime next week. A minor miracle…
The door opens as you get to the bottom of your coffee cup. It’s Jack. He’s remembered to shave, but his tee-shirt is even more faded than yesterday’s. “Morning.” He plants himself in the other office chair and turns the laptop sitting on his side of the desk to face you. “You might find this interesting.”
“Uh, what?” He’s grinning.
“I logged in before I got here.” He points to a big aerial photograph of a city, something like a spy satellite image. “While I was stuck on the bus, I wrote a plug-in to map the IP addresses of the auction site users into an overlay for Google Earth. I figured that being able to visualize where they were would be…well. It’s not guaranteed accurate—they could be tunnelling in from elsewhere, or covering their trail in some other way—but what I found was interesting.” He flicks a couple of commands at the air, and the pointer tracks across the screen as the image zooms in until you’re looking at a gleaming metal building that looks like a gigantic wood-louse. “Glasgow SECC— the conference centre.” A bunch of green triangles appear, clustered heavily around one end of the building. “That’s where the local hot spot is. There’s another stash here”—he zooms out, dizzyingly, the city dwindling to a pimple on the side of Scotland, then the entire British Isles receding towards the horizon of a curved sphere, spinning round and zooming in again somewhere near the northern end of the Bay of Bengal—“but I figure Glasgow’s easier for us to get to than Dhaka.”
“Glasgow? You sure about that?” It doesn’t entirely make sense to you.
“Yeah.” He twitches over to another window. “The hot spot of auction offers is hanging off the centre’s local switch. That’s where they’re selling their loot. There’s a lot of game activity there, looks like”—he’s blinking and twitching behind his glasses—“there’s a gaming con there. It’s a bank holiday on Friday, isn’t it? But midweek, that doesn’t make sense unless…”
“What’s the con-convention?” you ask, trying to sound only appropriately interested. Not that you know much about such things—you’ve done a few re-enactment events, but hotels and hucksters and hordes of socially inept fanboys don’t tempt you.
“Let’s see.” He Googles for a minute. “Oh, right—yup, it’s a business convention. Sponsored by blah, foo, and Kensu International, oh what a surprise. Hmm. Today’s a public day. Tickets are fifty euros.”
Your mailbox whistles for attention: A note from Wayne has just come in. “First things first. Phone, get me Sergeant Smith.” You wait expectantly for a few seconds, but it dumps you into a voice mailbox. “Oh. Hello, Sergeant. Elaine from Dietrich-Brunner here—can you call me when you get this? I believe we’ve got a lead for you on the items that were stolen from Hayek Associates. Bye.” You disconnect, then turn back to Jack. “Alright. You’re the local—how do we get to Glasgow from here?”
Glasgow turns out to be a fifty-minute train ride away from Edinburgh. Worse, the SECC isn’t next door to the station—it’s a trek out of the centre, several stops away on the toytown model underground system. So after spending a futile ten minutes trying to scrape various badly designed railway company websites, Jack suggests taking the first available connection, then catching a taxi at the other end if necessary. The train turns out to be your usual tired old nag of a commuter service (the shiny new maglev doesn’t open for another two years), and by the time you’re halfway there—staring out of the windows at an implausibly damp landscape outside Falkirk—you’re beginning to wish you’d simply flashed the company Amex and hired a helicopter.
