whimpered again, wriggling to try to get the busy fingers just where she needed them. For a moment, it seemed as though Cerise would ignore her, worse, had forgotten, but then her hand shifted, fingers settling to a familiar rhythm, and Trouble let herself be carried away, shuddering to her climax against Cerise’s hand.
Trouble lay still for a long moment, savoring the slow relaxation, the warmth of Cerise’s hand still cupped against her vulva, the weight of the other woman’s body sprawled half across her, head tucked comfortably just above her breast. She ran her hand down Cerise’s spine, felt the other woman shift slightly, as though she would have purred. And then the handset beside the bed beeped gently, echoed an instant later by a louder buzz from the media console.
“Fuck,” Cerise said, her mouth still against Trouble’s breast.
“We just did that,” Trouble said, unable to resist.
“You may have done,” Cerise said, and twisted free of Trouble’s embrace, reaching for the handset.
“So don’t answer,” Trouble said.
Cerise glared at her, and lifted the handset. “Yes?”
Trouble rolled onto her side, automatically pulling up her jeans, and grimaced at the soggy fabric between her legs. She had been stupid, and the knowledge of it chilled her to the bone. She didn’t believe in taking chances, not when she knew the odds, not even with Cerise. “Who is it?” she asked, and Cerise mouthed,
Cerise said aloud, “Yes, we have some of the information you were looking for.” She stopped, listening, and made a face. “Yeah, why don’t you come on up?” She listened again, nodded, and said, “All right.” Trouble rolled her eyes, and Cerise put the headset down with exquisite care.
“Hell, Cerise,” Trouble said.
“You think you’re disappointed?” Cerise said, and reached for her clothes. “You owe me, sweetheart.”
“No problem,” Trouble said, and meant it. “When’s he coming?”
“He’s on his way,” Cerise said, and gave a rueful smile. “Timing is everything.”
They managed to dress before Mabry knocked at the door, but only just. Trouble ran her fingers through her hair, well aware that it was even more disheveled than usual, and Cerise gave herself a disapproving look in the mirror as she went to answer the door.
“You said you had something for us?” she asked even before Mabry was fully into the room.
Mabry looked around once, eyebrows lifting in what might have been amusement. Trouble glared at him, daring him to say anything, and the big man looked away.
“You wanted to see more examples of newTrouble’s work,” he said. “I brought some. You said you had something for me?”
“It’s just finishing,” Trouble said, without looking at the screen.
“We have a rough address,” Cerise said. “It’s just a matter of narrowing it down.”
“That’s very good,” Mabry said, in what seemed to be genuine surprise. “I’m impressed.”
“It’s nice to have friends,” Trouble said.
“So,” Cerise said. “What have we got?” She crossed to the media center and leaned over the screen, frowning slightly. Trouble moved to join her, saw the list of names now neatly sorted by probabilities, and looked back at Mabry.
“Can I see your disk?”
Mabry handed it to her silently, and she stooped to collect her own carryall, discarded on the floor by the media center. She seated herself on the couch, stretching to reach a power node, and hastily rigged a working system. She slipped the disk into a drive, flipped through the files. Most of them were Treasury or Eurocop dissections of viruses or intrusion techniques, but a couple were straight transcripts of intrusion and pursuit. Those she paged through more slowly, frowning more deeply now. She was only dimly aware of the click of keys as Cerise worked her way through the list, or of Mabry still standing by the main door, hands shoved deep into his pockets. There was something familiar about the hand in the files, something familiar about the way the programs were constructed and the way newTrouble approached a job—not just that he had stolen from her work, that she could see and discount, torn between annoyance and flattery. But there was something about the stranger, about one exchange between newTrouble and a pursuing syscop— the flare of an icon, an exchange of insults, and then the quick and contemptuous disappearance—that reminded her of something, someone, she could not quite place. She ran her fingers through her hair, flipped back to an earlier file, looking for a file that dissected one of newTrouble’s icebreakers. The autopsy was well done, more sophisticated than the usual run of cops’ work, and she went through it slowly, line by line. This was familiar, too, though not quite in the same way as the intrusion she had been tracing; this time, at least, she could put a name to the model.
“This is the Mayor’s work,” she said aloud, and was startled when Mabry answered.
“The Mayor? Of Seahaven?”
“It can’t be the Mayor’s,” Cerise said, ignoring Mabry. “He’d never give anything of his to newTrouble.”
“It’s still the Mayor’s work,” Trouble said.
“Surely he—newTrouble—could have stolen it?” Mabry asked.
Trouble shook her head as Cerise came to join her, leaning down over her shoulder to study the little screen. “You don’t steal from the Mayor,” she said. “First, he’d never forgive you, would hunt you to the day you died—”
“Which wouldn’t be very far off,” Cerise said.
“—and, second, you’d have to break his IC(E) to do it.” Trouble shook her head again. “The Mayor— virtual-Seahaven’s his own private fortress. There are parts where he doesn’t need IC(E), the programming is so idiosyncratic. Nobody’s ever stolen anything from him. Not anything important.”
“That is the Mayor’s hand,” Cerise said, leaned further forward so that her arm was resting on Trouble’s shoulder. Trouble was briefly aware of the scent of her, sex and sweat and perfume.
“Take a look at this one,” she said, and touched the controls to recall the first file. “It looks like the Mayor, too, a little, but there’s something else…”
“It reminds me of Silk,” Cerise said.
“Silk?” That was Mabry again, moving in from the doorway.
Cerise brushed past him to retrieve a disk from the media center. “Take a look at this,” she said, and handed it to Trouble.
Trouble took it, fed it into the secondary drive, and waited while the machine absorbed the contents. There was a lock on the main file, and Cerise leaned past her, breast nudging against her shoulder, to touch the codes that released it. Trouble nodded her thanks, and opened the file. It was a work-in-progress, blocks of as-yet- unwritten code replaced with cryptically labeled placeholders, but the basic intent was clear enough. It was a display program, mostly iconage, but married to the bones of a decent-looking icepick: a show-off program, Trouble thought, the sort of thing kids wrote, to prove what they could do. It would work its way through someone’s IC(E)—probably without alerting security; even in the skeletal state, she could see that it was a pick, not a hammer—and then, in the heart of a supposedly secure system, unfurl its iconage. And probably something else, too, she realized suddenly, looking at the missing pieces of code. There was certainly a place for a viral payload.
“It’s a clever piece of work,” she said aloud. “And it looks like newTrouble, all right. What’s good is brilliant, but there’s some sloppy work around the edges.”
“He’s added code he didn’t write,” Mabry said. “See, there and there, those timers—and he hasn’t bothered to integrate it.”
“I got this,” Cerise said, deliberately, “out of Silk’s space. Silk’s work.”
“You think they’re the same person?” Trouble asked.
Cerise closed her eyes, trying to recapture the feeling of the first intrusion, her sense of that hand, compared it to the sense she’d had of Silk, in their two meetings. Bearing in mind that Silk had meant to hustle her, had overlaid her— his?—program with deliberate seduction, while the intruder had been after other game— yes, there had been a hint of Trouble, her own Trouble and the imposter’s version of that hand, in Silk’s approach. It was, she acknowledged, one reason she had fallen for it so easily. “Yeah,” she said aloud. “Yes, I think so.”
“And there’s a connection to the Mayor as well?” Mabry asked. His voice was tight, controlled, and Cerise
