Deathworld

'You look bothered. What's the matter? Trouble with your folks?'

'Me? No.' Charlie laughed, but he wasn't surprised that the sound didn't come out sounding particularly humorous. 'Look, I have to ask you something.'

'Blaze away.'

'I'm not sure it's not illegal.'

Mark put up his eyebrows. 'Oh? Not your usual mode of operation, Mr. Straight Arrow.'

'Don't remind me. I need to get at some information.' 'You interest me strangely.'

Mark's suddenly delighted expression made Charlie laugh. 'Nothing real involved. I need to get at some medical records.'

Mark looked bemused. 'Thought you'd usually ask your dad about that kind of thing.'

'Not just general information. I need to get at some county coroner's files.'

'Aha,' Mark said, and leaned back in his chair. 'Not public files, then.'

'Nope. Autopsies.'

'Wow, truly disgusting,' Mark said, not sounding disgusted in the slightest. 'I wanna see, too.'

'Not sure it would be good for you to see this stuff,' Charlie said, uneasy. 'Heck, I don't really even want to see it.'

'You're gonna have a hard time getting at it in the first place without me,' Mark said, sounding all too matter-of-fact. 'Come on, Charlie, I'm not going to look over your shoulder if you're really worried. But it'd make me feel a lot better if you'd tell me what was going on.'

Charlie didn't see that he had any choice. He sat down on one of the chairs pulled into the circle and told Mark the basics of his problem, without mentioning any names.

When he was finished, Mark sat down across the circle from him and folded his arms, thinking. 'Been a lot of attention on Deathworld, hasn't there?' he said. 'Since the last couple of suicides. _ _

'Yeah.'

'But you don't need me to break in there, I take it.' 'Nope. It's just this medical stuff I'm after.'

Mark sighed. 'Pity,' he said. 'Deathworld would have been a challenge… But as for this other stuff, we can do it this evening, if you like.'

'Really?'

'Shoot, we can do it now.'

Mark opened a drawer in his desk, looked at the e-mail 'solids' floating around above the desk. 'Okay, every- body i '

n…

One after another the icons dropped into the drawer, all but one, a recalcitrant sphere that hung bobbing in the air over the desk and wouldn't budge. 'Yes, you, too, get in there!'

'You promised you would deal with this today,' said the e-mail, in Jay Gridley's voice.

Charlie's eyebrows went up. Mark flushed pink and grabbed the mail out of the air, stuffing it in his pocket. 'No rest for the weary,' he said. 'Never mind.'

Mark dusted his hands off, knocked the drawer shut with his hip. 'Okay,' he said, 'let's see what you've got.'

Charlie fished around in his own pocket and came up with a notepad, the icon for a little file full of bureau names that he was carrying with him. He handed it to Mark. Mark tossed it onto the desk, and a window appeared in the air in front of them and displayed the list.

'Mmm,' Mark said. 'Bangor County Coroner's Office, Collins County Police Coroner, Arlington City Coroner's Department…' There were six offices matched with six victims-the paired suicide, the most recent one, was being handled by two different coroner's offices, as the kids had lived in two different jurisdictions.

Mark stood there with his arms folded, thinking for a moment. 'Let's do the county systems first,' he said. 'Then the police ones. The cops are likely to have better security, and they might take us a little longer.'

'You don't think they're likely to alert each other that someone's going after data on the suicides?' Charlie said, beginning to get nervous. He was feeling guilty already.

'I doubt it,' said Mark. 'There isn't nearly as much cooperation between police forces as there should be if they really want to make their systems secure. Especially regionally. Too much rivalry…' He grinned slightly. 'Old habits die hard. Besides, these people don't seem to have been comparing notes in the first place, do they? I mean, just from what you told me now, the fact that all the suicides seem to involve a hanging of one kind or another-no one seems to have picked up on that. At least nothing's been mentioned about it on the news.'

'They might be hiding that information,' Charlie said, uncertain.

'If they were coordinating, yeah. But we don't have any proof that they are. So let's stir around a little and see what we find. If any of the data you're interested in is trip-wired, or has associational links to similar data in some other police department's network, then that might indicate that they're talking to each other privately about this stuff. Meanwhile'-he looked at the list-'Let's start with Bangor.'

Mark looked around him. 'Okay,' he said to his workspace, 'strike the set.'

The VAB, the sunlight, the little flickery shadows of the buzzards away up high-it all vanished away in a blink, leaving them in a peculiar sort of darkness in which the two of them were illuminated, but nothing else was. The only other thing visible was the window with the names of the agencies Charlie wanted to raid for information. 'Bring up the advanced-level penetration utility,' Mark said.

And the floor of Mark's workspace suddenly became visible. More than visible. It was transparent, so that Charlie could see down into it, for what looked like maybe a thousand meters. The space below their feet was full of light, light of every color, columns and lines and pillars of it, some horizontal but mostly vertical, interwoven, sometimes even interpenetrating. This was an expression of a program that Mark had designed for getting into other programs. 'What language did you write this in?' Charlie said, very impressed.

'Digamma, it's called. Nasty stuff.'

'I believe you.' Charlie knew in a general sort of way that every line of the light he saw reaching down to limitless depths beneath him was a statement in computer code of some kind, but there his knowledge stopped. 'Man, I'm just getting the hang of Caldera. I thought that was complicated-!'

'Yeah, you wouldn't want to mess with Digamma unless you were seriously unbalanced,' Mark said. He looked down into the abysses of light, and the whole deep panorama began moving with great speed underneath him, slipping sideways. Then it was as if the floor on which they stood plunged downward like an elevator, though they weren't actually moving at all-rather, the graphic expression of the 'penetration' program was pouring itself up past the two of them into the air around them as ghosts of structures of light. It paused, then pouring sideways again as the program sorted for some specific spot that Mark had in mind. After a moment it stopped, which was a good thing, because Charlie's stomach was bouncing around inside him as if he was on a roller coaster.

' 'Unbalanced,' ' Charlie said, trying to get control of himself. 'This suggests certain possibilities about you, Mr. Gridley.'

'Don't it just,' Mark said, sounding distracted for a moment. 'Necessary, though. A lot of the Net Force master computers' routines are running in Digamma… you want to work with those, you have to learn it eventually. My dad started teaching it to me when I was seven. I'm just now really getting the hang of _t.' He interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. 'Okay, now watch this.'

He beckoned over the window in which Charlie's 'addresses' were written, and poked the first one with his finger. 'Identify,' he said to his program, 'and locate.'

They stood there in the bright silence for a moment, and suddenly a string of letters and numbers which meant nothing whatsoever to Charlie strung themselves out in the air in front of him and Mark in a blaze of crimson. Around them, the colors of the penetration program went mostly to blues and greens.

'Good,' Mark said. 'That's the raw Net address. It tells me a little about their security… which frankly, needs to be looked at. These guys must think they're safe from intrusion.' He smiled slightly. 'Well…'

'Can you get in?' Charlie said.

'In? We're in already.' Mark glanced around him. 'At least, we're in their system. Now we have to crack their security, preferably without them noticing, and go hunting. Look, the information you want, it'd probably be easier for you to identify as images, yeah?'

'That's the best way for me.'

'Okay. Home system. Go graphic.'