still too interested in her system to make it possible for her to chase down the rumors. She checked the main screen automatically, saw Starling’s watchdog still patiently chasing its tail, and touched the keys that released the crude muzzle. The program unfolded itself, sent a burst of codes across her screen, found nothing, and went dormant again, momentarily satisfied. Trouble eyed it uncertainly—she couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t spotted her interference, working with a three-year-old muzzle—but there was nothing she could do about it if it had. The worst it could do was testify that she had a brainworm—bad, but not an unbeatable charge. At least it could not, by itself, prove that she was Trouble.
And she had made a good start. Trouble smiled slowly, savoring the memory of the Jigsaw game. It had been fun to play again, to play at her own top capacity; it had been even more fun to name herself, and watch the panic set in. Once she was known to be back, she herself, the original, the only Trouble, someone would tell her who this pretender really was. And then she could deal with it, either by shopping the pretender to the cops—she had no obligations there, after the stranger had stolen her name, her style—or by revealing the pretense on the wider nets. The latter was probably the more satisfying option, though selling out the pretender was safer, and she allowed herself a grin, contemplating the possibilities.
Her fingers were cramping inside the tight shell of the metal-bound glove. She winced, working her hand against servos gone suddenly stiff and unresponsive, and sat up enough to unplug the glove. The pain eased, and she stretched cautiously, opening and closing her hand, until she was certain the cramps would not return. Then she snapped open the catches, and eased the glove away from her fingers. Trouble’s return—the return of the real Trouble, she amended silently—would be the talk of the nets within half an hour. All she had to do was back it up.
Fortunately, that wouldn’t be hard. But before she could go much further, she needed a new toolkit, and probably a new implant to manage data transfer to the brainworm. After three years, the old chip was outclassed, and while she could make or steal much of the software and bioware that she needed, it would be quicker and more efficient—and safer, too, in the long run—to buy what she needed from one of the shadow dealers who infested the coast. She had the money for it, a little more than five thousand in a mix of citiscrip, bearer cards, and an ugly grey-green wad of oldmoney; and besides, she told herself, buying a new kit would be one more way of announcing her return.
A chime sounded from the intercom, and she jumped before she realized what it was.
“India?” A female voice too distorted to recognize paused briefly, static singing through the speaker. “India, are you down there?”
Trouble touched the answer button, her heart still racing painfully. “I’m here. What is it?”
“Are you on line? I—we’d like to talk to you.”
“If I was on line,” Trouble said, “I wouldn’t be answering you.” She stopped, took a deep breath, backing away from the bravado of the nets. “Sorry. Who’s we?”
“Me, Oba, Mike, and Terri Lofting.”
At least half of the Management Committee, plus whoever was doing the talking. Trouble took a deep breath, feeling the sudden chill run along her spine. “I’ll be right up.”
She took the time anyway to shut things down properly, so that no one could complain of her work as syscop, and went upstairs. The delegation was waiting at the main door, the evening sky behind them glowing red and orange between the layers of clouds, like embers in a banked fire. She studied them for an instant as she opened the door—it was the entire Management Committee, plus Judy Merric, who had once been a paralegal and did most of the legal talking for the coop—and beckoned them into the brightly lit kitchen.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“You tell us,” Teresa Lofting said. She was the oldest member of the committee, grey-haired and soft- bodied, but there was a will of iron beneath the grandmotherly exterior. She had built the co-op almost out of nothing, and was fiercely protective of its rights.
“Let’s sit down,” Alvarez said hastily. “If you don’t mind, India.”
“No,” Trouble said, without sincerity, and waved them on into the living room. She thought for a moment of offering coffee and tea, but, looking at the grim faces, suspected that it would only put off the inevitable. “What’s this all about?” she said again, and sat down on the chair beside the unused stove.
The others took their places reluctantly, exchanging glances, and at last Alvarez said, “The Treasury agents, the ones who were here the other day. What do they want with you?”
“They were asking about a cracker who may have been going through my—our—nodes,” Trouble said, and wondered why she bothered. “I told them I hadn’t seen anything, and gave them a copy of the sheriff’s report—my report to the sheriff. That’s all.”
“And had you?” Lofting asked. Trouble frowned, and the older woman amplified, her voice still sweetly reasonable. “Had you seen anything?”
“No,” Trouble said, and didn’t bother hiding her annoyance.
“Hey, people,” Merric said softly, and Mike Ishida said, “Yeah, let’s begin at the beginning. India doesn’t know what’s been going on today.”
Trouble looked warily at them, already not sure she wanted to know, and Alvarez said, “All right, Mike, you tell her.”
Ishida gave a wry smile, careful to include all of them—but Lofting, at least, wasn’t buying, Trouble thought, and Alvarez didn’t look too happy, either. And if Merric’s here— she might only have been a paralegal, but she had a good sense of the legal process. If she was worried, then Treasury might well be close to an arrest.
“We’ve been getting a lot of attention from the authorities all of a sudden,” Ishida said. “I got a phone call from a Mr. Levy, who says he’s with the Treasury, asking about you, India—asking how you came to work for us, what we know about you—asking me in my capacity as a committee speaker. Oba and Terri got the same kind of inquiries, and when I asked around, a lot of people had been getting informal questions. So what’s going on?”
Trouble spread her hands. “I don’t entirely know. What they told me was, they tracked a cracker using my nodes, my net. I checked into it, of course, and didn’t find any signs of anyone, but what I hear on the net is, there’s a cracker come back from the dead, somebody nobody’s heard of in years, who’s causing a lot of trouble. What the connection is with me, I don’t know.” And everything except the last sentence was absolutely true.
The other four exchanged glances, Lofting still with that gentle, implacable moue of distaste that was more alarming than any overt threat. Merric leaned forward slightly. “India—”
“Very well,” Lofting said, riding over whatever the ex-paralegal would have said. “I can accept that you don’t quite know what’s happening, I can even believe that you didn’t know that this—cracker—was back in business, but I find it hard to believe that you didn’t know this person. If that’s what you tell us, however—” She paused, clearly waiting for a denial. Trouble made her expression as guileless as possible, and, after a moment, Lofting continued. “—then we have to accept it. But I—we of the Management Committee— cannot support you if you’ve been involved in illegal activities. I want that clearly understood.”
“We knew perfectly well when India came to us that hiring any syscop out of the shadows might present problems,” Ishida began. “And we agreed then—”
“Do you understand?” Lofting said, as if the younger man hadn’t spoken.
Oh, yes, Trouble thought, I understand, and bit her tongue to keep from speaking it aloud. You’re washing your hands of me, regardless of what I’ve done—or, more precisely, because you believe I’ve done whatever it is they’re accusing me of… Which of course I did do, once upon a time and sort of, because I was—I am—Trouble. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so serious—hell, it is funny. She sat still for a moment longer, considered and discarded three different answers. It was quiet in the condo; she could hear, in the far distance, the dulled, steady rush of traffic on the flyway. She said at last, “You don’t leave me many options. As it happens, I haven’t been running shadow jobs here—” She used the cracker’s phrase deliberately, and saw Merric wince. “—but that doesn’t seem to matter, to you or to Treasury. Like Mike said, you knew—I told you—what I’d done before I came here, back when it wasn’t illegal, and you said then it didn’t matter. However, I don’t intend to involve you, the co-op, in my troubles.”
Ishida flinched at that, and Alvarez looked up, as though he would protest. Even Lofting had the grace to look faintly uncomfortable, but she rallied quickly. “The co-op can’t afford your troubles—can’t afford cracker troubles,” she said. “The law—Evans-Tindale is very clear about what makes an accessory. You know that.”
She had been looking at Trouble, but it was Alvarez who nodded. “I’m sorry, India,” he said.
“So,” Trouble began, and Lofting cut in.
