Trouble and Her Friends

systems she and Trouble had owned, maybe new bioware to bring her brainworm up to speed, and that meant a trip to Seahaven—the real one, she amended, with an inward smile, not the virtual town that went by the same name. The seacoast town was the East Coast’s greatest source for black-and grey-market netware, hard and soft alike. But it was correspondingly expensive: she would have to crack that IC(E), the IC(E) Trouble had refused to face with her. Anything with that big a fence around it had to be valuable, and there would be a grace period before Treasury got itself together. She could take what she needed, sell it, and be on the road to Seahaven, the real Seahaven, before anyone knew what had happened. And it would serve Trouble right, prove she’d been wrong to leave—

“Cerise?” Van Liesvelt was leaning forward slightly, both elbows on the tilting tabletop.

“Hey, careful,” Held said, and Arabesque pressed down on her side of the table, steadying it.

“You all right, Cerise?” van Liesvelt asked.

Cerise nodded. “Yeah, I’m all right,” she said, and thought she meant it. She smiled, calculating the effect. “I’ll be going to Seahaven. After I’ve done some—work.”

Helling said, “That was serious IC(E), Trouble said. And you don’t know what’s behind it.”

“If there’s that much IC(E),” Cerise said, “it has to be worth something. And I want to do some shopping.”

“Your credit’s good with me,” Held said. He had done her other implants, from the original dollie-slot and box to the brainworm. Cerise nodded her thanks.

“I appreciate it, Carlie, but I don’t take charity.” She looked around the table. “Anyone interested in coming in on this with me?”

Mason shook her head. “I’m—I think I’m going to lie low for a while,” she said, and Cerise was suddenly certain that was not what the other woman had meant to say.

“You’re quitting,” Arabesque said, the words an accusation, and Mason glared at her.

“I don’t know yet, but I’m damn sure it’s the smart thing to do.”

“Butch?” Cerise said.

Van Liesvelt looked down at his beer. “I think Dewildah’s right. I’m going to lie low, see how things shape up before I take on anything else.”

Cerise nodded. “Arabesque?”

The other woman hesitated, made a face. “I know the job you mean, and I’m not taking on that IC(E) with what I got right now. You wait a month, let me get my new bioware tuned in, and I’ll go in with you.”

“I’m not waiting,” Cerise said flatly. If I wait, she thought, if I wait, Trouble may come back and try to talk me out of it again—or worse still, maybe she won’t come back, and I’ll be left truly on my own. She shook the thought away. “Max, you interested?”

“I’ve plenty of work of my own, thanks,” Helling answered.

“Fine.”

Held said again, “Cerise, I do give credit—”

“And I don’t take charity.” Cerise shook her head, shaking away temptation. “Thanks, Carlie, but I can’t.” I don’t care what Trouble says, what any of them say, she thought. I’m not going to let things change.

TROUBLE

Chapter Two

TROUBLE’S ON THE nets tonight, riding the high data like a cowboy, the plains of light stark around her. The data flows and writhes like grass in the virtual wind, and she glides along the shifts and shadows, a shadow herself against their virtual sun. At the starpoint node, she slides from that high plane into a datastream like a canyon, falls suddenly into shadow, its warning cool along her skin.

IC(E) rises to either side, prohibiting the nodes, great heaps and coils of it like glittering wire, and the old urge returns. She studies it, and knows that she has keys in her toolbox that will unlock them all, fingertips tingling with the memory of their touch smooth as silk. She can almost taste what lies behind that barrier, files and codes turned to candy-color shapes good enough to eat, and remembers the sweet-sour tang, the glorious greed of gorging on the good bits, sorting them in an eyeblink by taste and smell, faster and more sure than anyone else in the business. She lifts her hand, the icon shimmering into existence, familiar routine half- invoked, but makes herself turn away. The IC(E) glitters behind her, lights trembling as though something behind it laughed, and she thinks she hears the whisper of a giggle.

The same sensation touches her like a finger of flame, a taunt literally stinging like electricity, but she has learned long since to ignore that cleverest of lures. She leaves the way she came, sliding oblique along a trail of untouched data, slick beneath her feet like a film of ice, and glances back to see the net healing itself behind her, closing to leave no trace she’s ever been there. This night’s city flows beneath her, data streams like rivers of cars, and she walks the nets down again, merging with the data until it pools and slows and feeds out into the great delta of the BBS. Here are all the temptations of the world, spread out in the broad meanders and the bottomless swamps, where slow transfer is common and the sheer volume hides a multitude of sins. The air around her thickens as the brainworm reads the data as sensation, and she flings back her head, smelling spice and oil and a bitter tang like vinegar, carried on a virtual breeze that wraps itself around her illusory body. She pauses—not lost; she is never lost, not here, where the brainworm does its best and a lesser netwalker could drown in the sheer overload of sensation—but savoring the taste and scent of rich and unprotected data, the salt ebb and flow of freedom. And then the reminder sounds, Cinderella chimes at the back of her mind. She finds a quiet current, a soft and transient node, and lets it carry her home.

The flat dull light of the basement workspace was blinding after the glittering contrast of the nets, and it was cold. She blinked twice, the lines of this night’s city still ghosting across her vision, reflections of the net covering the real world, and reached for the cord plugged into the dollie-slot behind her ear. She popped it free, feeling the dull snap as the connection was fully broken, and her screen lit, displaying a record of the evening’s ramble as a series of node connections and transfers. Her private accounting program was running alongside, erasing and diffusing those connections, and the notations vanished one by one as the program progressed. Everything was as it should be, and she stretched and went to the high window, peering up at the dark glass. It ran with rain, and the lines of the net across her sight crossed and recrossed the running water. She stared at them for a long moment, held by an illusion of meaning, the deceptive gnosis of the nets, where every shape held a dozen contrary secrets. But off the nets, the images were random, and to demand more was a step toward lunacy. She shook herself, and turned away.

There was no point in turning up the heat, not when she would be going upstairs almost at once. She shivered, touched keys to trigger the program that would erase all traces of this night’s wanderings. She should know better— she was legit now, a syscop, even, and syscops didn’t need to walk the nets under false pretenses —but the wires woven directly into her cortex made every excursion onto the nets an adventure, and she had never been able to resist that challenge. The only trouble was that the brainworm was absolutely illegal here—had been since Evans-Tindale passed three years ago—and particularly for a syscop, but the net was nothing but colored lights without it. She grinned to herself, watching the screen flash from grey to white, icons flickering past—THREE PASSES COMPLETE, DATA DESTROYED, ATTEMPT RECOVERY: YES/NO?—and touched YES. Despite Treasury propaganda, the wire wasn’t addictive—she was living proof of it, had lived two years with her implants disabled, until she couldn’t stand the boredom any longer—but it was hard to go back to the sight-only, black- and-neon-glitter world when you’d had it all. The screen changed again, displayed an empty box: the trash program had finished its work. She set her toggles, putting the gateway to sleep, loosed her best watchdog into the household net, then, stretching again, started up the stairs toward her apartment.

It was later than she had realized, well into the new morning. Even Ned Paiso’s workshop was dark, and