unreadable. “I have my—priorities.”
Or your instructions, Cerise thought. “All right,” she said, “I’ll keep you informed.” She rose to leave, and Coigne’s voice stopped her in her tracks.
“I want more than that. I want this intruder, Cerise. I’ve never been more serious.”
Cerise looked back over her shoulder, wondering just what Coigne had been up to to produce what was, for him, a kind of panic. “I won’t forget,” she said, and slipped through the door before Coigne could call her back. It had been a petty effort—and useless, too; if Coigne wanted to continue the conversation, all he would have to do was ask for her— but it helped to take away the fear.
She made her way back down through the familiar tangle of corridors and elevators to Network Security, waited again while the guards processed her ID and waved her through into the inner rooms. A trio of operators was offline, clustered around a bluebox junction that looked homemade, and Cerise suppressed the temptation to stop and join the analysis. Instead, she went on into her own office, where Baeyen was still working at the lesser terminal.
“Sirico’s got his report,” Baeyen said, without looking up from her screen, and Cerise nodded, glancing quickly over the other woman’s shoulder. Nothing new there, just the usual security schema, and she pushed open the door to her private office.
The mail light was flashing, but she ignored it, touched buttons instead to signal the best of the three secretaries attached to the department. An instant later, her screen windows, and Landy Massek’s sharp face looked out at her.
“Yes, Ms. Cerise?”
“I need you to set up a meeting for me with Brendan Rabin at Corvo, sometime this afternoon for preference. Will you do that, and get back to me as soon as possible?”
“No problem,” Massek said cheerfully, and his window vanished.
Cerise sighed, and turned her attention to her mail. As she’d expected, the largest file was Sirico’s report, and she flipped through it quickly. He had been as thorough as ever, and had come up with nothing—which means, she thought, whoever it is, this new Trouble’s had trouble selling whatever s/he got. And since that’s not likely, unless Rabin has something really unexpected to tell me, like they’re not working on anything at the moment, it should mean that s/he didn’t get anything at all. She touched keys, flipping quickly through the remaining files, then switched to a different program and tied herself into Sirico’s last reported position. There was a brief hesitation, and then another window opened on her screen, displaying Sirico’s icon, a samurai-armored head and shoulders that looked vaguely robotic.
“Cerise?”
“Who were you expecting?” Cerise began, and cut herself off. “You did a nice job on the report, Pol.”
“Thanks.” The icon’s expression could not change—Sirico didn’t have a brainworm, was too obedient a networker for that—but the voice sounded faintly smug. “I don’t think they got anything, boss. Somebody’d be buying, if they had.”
“I think you’re right,” Cerise said. “Tell me, what else have you heard about this Trouble?”
There was the faintest of hesitations before he answered, just enough to convince her that there was something more. “Just talk. Nothing real.”
“Such as?”
There was a longer silence, and then Sirico blurted, “Word is, you used to work with somebody called Trouble.”
“That’s right.” Cerise had been expecting the question for almost twenty hours now; she found herself remotely surprised that none of the others had brought it up before. Except, of course, Coigne. “We were partners. You knew I came out of the shadows, Pol. Everyone does.”
“So, what do you want us to do about this one? Go slow?”
Cerise blinked at the screen, startled and a little touched by the offer. “No. I want to stop any more problems before they get started—and besides, I don’t think it’s the Trouble I used to know.”
“There are people saying that,” Sirico said. “And there are a lot of people who are pretty pissed at this one. He/she’s been teasing the big names, and stirred up a lot of security in the process.”
Definitely not my Trouble, Cerise thought. “Any word on how to contact this Trouble?”
“What else?” Sirico asked, and the icon would have grinned if it could. “Seahaven.”
“Ah.” Cerise leaned back in her chair. She had expected nothing less, of course, would have been disappointed if she had gotten any other answer. Seahaven was the last and greatest of the virtual villages, the last survivor of a dozen similar spaces that had existed before Evans-Tindale. It was a virtual space run by and for its unknown architect, the Mayor, an unreal place policed, positioned, and created entirely at his whim. If you entered its influence, you agreed to abide by its rules, to subordinate whatever filters you used to interpret the net to its own system. It was a spectacular effect, and a dangerous one; there were always people who tried to beat the local system, force it to bend to their whim, and while they always failed, the fallout could be disastrous. It had always been a cracker’s haven; now it was one of the last remaining spaces where the shadow walkers could conduct their business. It was also one of the net’s greatest temptations, and home of its greatest dangers: Trouble had said once that if it were on any map, it would have to be labeled, quite literally, HERE BE DRAGONS.
“Do you have any idea where I’d look for Seahaven these days?”
Sirico’s icon shifted color, went yellow for a brief instant, the equivalent of a shrug. “New Hampshire?”
“Very funny.” Cerise frowned at the screen. Seahaven was also a town on the New Hampshire coast, maybe ninety-five kilometers to the north. It had once been a summer resort and a fishing town, but as the beaches became dangerous, racked with high UV sunlight, eaten away by pollution and the shifting tideline, other businesses had dwindled, until the entire population was dependent on the secure hotel built just outside the town on pilings driven into the salt marsh. The hotel was highly rated among the multinationals who needed absolute security for their negotiations—there had never been a successful raid, virtual or real, on the facility, and only a handful of attempts—and the lack of other work in the area kept its prices lower than most. Seahaven, the offline Seahaven, existed now only to service the hotel, and the hotel and the town government worked hand in glove to keep it that way. Cerise had lived there for an interminable eight months after Evans-Tindale—the old beachfront Parcade was one of the best sources along the East Coast for black-and grey-market ware, and she had been desperate for new hardware—and had hated it. The ghost of a town, worse still, the ghost of a virtual town, hopeless and dying, with nothing to do but serve the hotel and throw rocks and bottles at straying strangers: live free or die, Cerise thought, only they can’t seem to do either. She shook away the flash of memory, salt air and the smell of oil smoke drifting along the beachfront, said aloud, “The Seahaven that matters, Pol. Any ideas?”
“I don’t know. The last I heard, if you wanted to go to Seahaven, take a walk through the Bazaar. But that was a week ago.”
Cerise sighed. “Right, thanks. Keep an eye out for any sale from this intrusion, will you?”
“How long do you want me to watch?” Sirico asked.
“Give it another thirty-two hours,” Cerise answered. “If we haven’t seen anything by then, we’re not going to.”
“OK.”
“Thanks, Pol,” Cerise said, and cut the connection. She stared at the screen for a moment, then touched keys to sound the net. The system flashed an instant list of everyone’s position on-line. The simplest thing would be to post a general message, but traveling to net-Seahaven was still something a little questionable, a long step toward the shadows; for her people’s sake, it would be better to ask them individually. She studied the list, then blanked the screen. None of the duty operators were likely to admit knowing the road, even if they did know it, which wasn’t terribly likely; better to hit the net herself, head for the BBS and the Bazaar that lay at its heart, and find her own way from there. And, she admitted, with a wry smile at her own frailties, it would be more fun to do it herself.
Before she could tie in, a chime sounded, and Massek’s face appeared in the corner of her screen. “I’ve set up an appointment with Mr. Rabin, Ms. Cerise. Is two-thirty all right with you?”
Cerise made a face. “Can you make it any later, Landy?”
“Sorry. Mr. Rabin’s got a meeting at three as it is, and he expects to be there the rest of the day.”
“All right,” Cerise said, and knew she sounded irritable. “Two-thirty it is.”
