Trouble and Her Friends

“Ah.” Tinati leaned back again, unfolding his hands. “Then I take it that resuming your old association is purely unofficial.”

“So far,” Cerise answered, with more certainty than she felt. Multiplane—or, more precisely, Coigne— would be extremely unhappy when they found out she’d been working with Trouble; only delivering the newTrouble’s head on a virtual platter would have any chance of appeasing them.

“So I think I’m safe in saying this is the net’s business,” Tinati said. He looked at Trouble. “I don’t mess with the net. It’s not my bosses’ policy, and it doesn’t pay. I want that clearly understood. But if the net is cracking down on this new Trouble—well, I won’t stand in your way. And I won’t help, either. This is strictly the net’s affair.”

“What about your people?” Trouble asked. “I’m going to be asking questions. Your sanction, your forbearance, at the least, that would make a big difference.” She was taking a chance, and she knew it, was not surprised when Tinati shook his head.

“What my people do is their business, up to the individual. I’m not for you, I’m not against you, I’m not involved. Don’t make me get involved.”

“As you say,” Trouble answered, “it’s the net’s business.”

“It’s getting very close to real,” Tinati said.

Cerise laughed, the sound loud in the quiet room. Even Tinati looked startled for an instant, and hid it quickly behind his lawyer’s mask. “All we want is to resolve a problem, Tinati—one that’s already a thorn in your side as well as ours.”

“It’s a straightforward deal,” Trouble said. “We find him, I shop him to Treasury, and that’s the end of it.”

“I hope so,” Tinati said. “I hope it’s that simple, Trouble. I don’t appreciate complications.”

“If there are any complications,” Trouble said, “they’ll come from you.”

Tinati studied her for a long moment, nodded at last. “As I said, this is the net’s business. I don’t interfere with the net.”

“Until it interferes with you,” Cerise said, and sounded almost happy.

“I’m glad we understand each other,” Tinati said, and there was more than a hint of irony in his tone. “Kenny, will you show the ladies out?”

Aimoto led them back down the stairs and out into the bright sunlight of the Parcade. “Good to see you again, Ms. Cerise,” he said, and disappeared back into the palace before the black-clad woman could answer.

“I bet,” Trouble said, and started walking back down the Parcade. Cerise fell into step beside her.

“So now what?” she asked. “Bother some more dealers?”

Trouble considered the question, shook her head slowly. “No. No, I don’t think it’d do much good. If anybody’s going to tell us, it’s going to be Mollie, and that’s going to take time.”

Cerise nodded. “I agree. So what, see what the nets are saying—see what’s going on in the other Seahaven, maybe?”

Trouble smiled wryly, remembering her last visit to virtual Seahaven. “Maybe you better do that,” she said. “I’m not exactly persona grata there just at the moment.”

“Can’t imagine why.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Trouble said, and saw Cerise’s expression go suddenly wooden. There had been too much of an echo of the old days, too much a reminder of the old give-and-take and where it had led them both, and she added, much too late, “If you wouldn’t mind. Please.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Cerise said, still stiff-faced, and lengthened her step with sudden angry energy, striding off down the Parcade toward the main road that led back to Seahaven. Trouble watched her go, knowing better than to call her back, and could have kicked herself for her own clumsiness. She had always given the orders on jobs like this—she was good at the jobs where the real world intersected the virtual, better than Cerise, and better than Cerise, too, when it came to vengeance. Cerise enjoyed the chase, but lost interest once the catch was made. It had always been Trouble, in the end, who’d made the kills. It was old knowledge, not even regret anymore, and Trouble put it briskly aside, and with it the possibility that Cerise, too, might have changed. She started down the Parcade in Cerise’s wake, not hurrying. She would let Cerise visit virtual Seahaven, all right, but she’d also run her own discreet checks, just in case. She could not forget, couldn’t afford to forget, that they weren’t a partnership anymore.

SILK

Chapter Nine

CERISE FLOATS THROUGH the streets of Seahaven, frozen in a premature winter, the buildings white on black, heaped with snow. Even with a counterroutine in place, she feels the Mayor’s cold, radiating up from the ice-rimed streets and the frozen canal that runs straight as a surveyor’s line beside her. The same cold, damp and unpleasant, realer than IC(E), radiates from the building to her left, from the snow-heavy roof and the icicle-hung windows. She imagines her counterroutine as a cloak of fur, fur whiter than snow, greyer than ice, all soft warmth she’s never really felt, and hugs it to her, cobbles a display and drapes her icon in barbaric luxury. She drifts on, wrapped in false fur, her feet not quite touching the slick-glazed surface, heading for the market plaza.

She slows as she gets closer, remembering the real Seahaven, remembering Trouble, Trouble giving her orders as though nothing had changed, as though she’d never walked out with all her worldly goods and left Cerise bewildered and angry, remembering, too, how good it had felt to be back together even just on the street, and wonders what she will do now. Find out what they are saying in the market about newTrouble, certainly; that she would do for herself, even if it weren’t what Trouble wanted. But afterwards… She fingers a code in memory, the mailcode Silk had left her, wrapped in a glittering, Christmas-wrapped bomb. After that, perhaps, perhaps she will follow that code, and see what Silk has to say for herself.

The market plaza is busy, and she is glad of it, lets herself drift through the crowd, not hiding her presence, but not advertising it, either. She hears fragments of gossip, sees a silver sphere spring up briefly around a pair of icons—sees too the watchdog lunge for them—but hears nothing that she doesn’t already know. Trouble—the original, her Trouble—is looking for the newTrouble, the one who usurped her name; the net is divided as to the rights of it, the snatches she hears uneasy, uncertain, but the lines are drawn. The only question left now is who will stand where. It is as she expected pretty much, and she turns along the message wall, readying a program she calls sticky fingers, lets it trawl past the gaudy surface. She feels it working, process translated as sensation, a vibration that becomes now and then a thump, as though she dragged a stick across an uneven surface. She is proud of this routine, of the quick-search, the codebreaker, that lets her scan the posted mail and steal quick-copies of those messages that match the search criteria. They will be imperfect, made on the fly, but she can reconstruct them later, and they will give her an idea of how the net is taking this.

She reaches the end of the wall, and feels the program shut itself down, slapping back into her hand, the stolen messages heavy in memory. She finds a departure node, lets herself out onto the net, hovers for an instant in the datastream, letting the bits pour past her like a river of gold. She should go home, or back to real-Seahaven, where she can study the data that hangs in memory, but she reaches instead for the mailcode she has carried with her since she met Silk, and follows it instead, turning down the lines of light toward the unreal space where Silk has said she can be found.

Trouble walks the net like the ghost of herself, brainworm turned off, presenting a generic icon to the general view. The net lies flat before her, black lines and dots on silver, black-and-grey symbols scribed across her sight as the net relays its messages. It is slow, painfully so, like wading through mud; she is deaf and numb swathed in the lack of sensation, and she feels her hands straining against the data gloves, muscles tightening as though, if she just works a little harder, she could feel again. She’s been through this before and