Deathworld

'Oh, come on, Charlie! I was real good. I didn't even leave them a potted palm.'

'Mark!'

'Oh, all right. Spoilsport.'

The sign righted itself. A moment later they were back in Mark's space, where a stack of what appeared to be manila files was floating in midair, and Mark was referencing the 'list' window again. 'Next-'

The lines and columns and pillars of light dived and swooped around them again, and Charlie closed his eyes after a few seconds of it, since his stomach really did not like this. 'Here we are,' Mark said, and they found themselves in another walled area, but this time they were inside the painted concrete walls, not outside them.

'Hmm,' Mark said. Charlie gulped, wanting to say a lot more than that, for the walls were moving in on them, like something out of an ancient 2-D horror flick… except that these walls were in 3-D, and, as they watched, were slowly sprouting long, cruel, inward-pointing iron spikes.

'Interesting,' Mark said. 'Those would pin us here, and ID us to the local system administrator, and lock a trace onto my system and any other one affiliated with this search. If we let them.' He snapped his fingers, and the pale tracery of his own Digamma routines became more visible around the two of them inside the rapidly shrinking space.

'And we're not gonna let them do that,' Charlie said, sweating harder, 'are we…?'

'Not a chance. Hush up now, I have to think.'

Charlie started to sweat harder and closed his eyes again as once more the Digamma framework around them did its zoom-and-swoosh roller-coaster number.

'They're a little paranoid here,' Mark said matter-of-factly. 'I wonder if they've had a break-in recently?'

Charlie opened his eyes again. The disorienting slide and swoop of colors had stopped, and Mark was holding in his arms what appeared to be a wide pipe of pure glowing yellow, as thick as the trunk of a tree. He was wedging one end of it against the inward-pushing wall on the left-hand side, and as Charlie watched Mark picked up the other end of the branchless yellow 'tree trunk' and began to pull on it. It lengthened as he pulled, until it came right up against the wall on the right-hand side. The walls pushed against it, pushed. The 'tree trunk' glowed briefly brighter, bent a little-then braced itself still, bending no more.

'There,' Mark said. He watched the walls keep trying to push, but they were making no headway. 'Automatic system,' Mark said. 'No one's watching it-banker's hours, as I said. Or else someone's gone for coffee.'

'Any way to tell which?' Charlie said, looking around them for a way out.

'Not without taking a chance that they might notice,' said Mark. 'Come on, let's find you what you need-' He walked over to the wall, brushed his fingers along it in the same testing sort of gesture he had used with the last one. 'Huh,' he said. 'Thought so. Just Caldera, this time. Here, watch this.'

Charlie went over to him, looked over his shoulder. 'See this?' Mark said, and pushed his hand right into the 'wall.' 'You can manipulate the programming directly without separate instructions, if you know where to grab each line. And you can exploit the holographic nature of the program-'

Charlie didn't know whether or not he should be relieved that he didn't have the slightest idea what Mark was talking about. A second after Mark thrust his hand into the wall, he pulled it out again, holding a doorknob. 'And as I thought,' Mark said, 'the programmer left herself a nice tidy way back into the main programming space for when she was finished testing this.' A door outlined itself in the wall: Mark used the doorknob to open it and stepped through. 'Mind your step, here-'

' 'She'?' Charlie asked, stepping through after him. They appeared to be in a dimly lit office that stretched for miles in all directions. 'You sure about that?'

'Ninety percent,' Mark said, walking through the office and looking around him. 'Just something about the feel of it Uh-oh. Somebody's in here. No, don't panic!'

Charlie froze and looked around him. Far off to his right, at what looked like about a mile's distance across this absurdly huge spread of carpeting and desks and office furniture and dividers, he could see a light shining over a desk.

'Just somebody looking at a file, somewhere else in the system,' Mark said. 'Possibly halfway across the city from where this facility is based. The odds of whoever it is being able to see us, or even being authorized to see us, are minuscule. Don't sweat it, just come on and let's see what the paradigm is-'

It took them only a few minutes to find it. Some of the desks had old-fashioned computer terminals on them, and Mark stopped by one of these and poked at it, a rounded eggy-looking thing done partly in a rather retro turquoise, partly in a translucent white plastic. 'Somebody here has a sense of humor,' Mark said, 'or nice taste in antiques.' He bent over to tap at the keyboard. 'What's your victim's name in Colorado?'

'Velasquez.'

'First initial?'

'J. Jaime.'

'Which year?'

'Twenty-three.'

'Right-' A moment later a large pile of square virtual datascrips appeared on the desk in front of them, and Mark glanced at them. 'Copy again?'

Charlie looked through them. Each scrip, as he picked it up, showed him on its surface what it contained. AUTOPSY SYNOPSIS, Charlie read, RAW DATA, ORGAN ANALYSES, TOXICOLOGY-'Yeah.'

Mark tapped at the console again. The datascrips vanished out of Charlie's hands. 'Done. Let's beat it and hit the next one-'

They got out of there, Mark carefully removing his 'tree trunk' and allowing the squashing walls to start coming together again, while at the same time wiping out any evidence of his and Charlie's intrusion. Then they hit the third facility, the coroner's office in Arlington. It had rather more effective security than the first two, so that Mark had to spend five minutes or so breaking in and making sure they wouldn't leave any trace of their entry behind, but the result was the same as in Bangor and Fort Collins.

The fourth Net-based system, at the coroner's offices in DeKalb County just east of Atlanta, to the astonishment of both of them had no security precautions installed around it whatsoever. Mark was practically dancing with frustration at such carelessness while Charlie raided it for the information he needed, and it was with the greatest of difficulty that Charlie kept Mark from building a security barrier around that system and then locking the DeKalb County staff out of it. Nothing Charlie could do, however, could keep Mark from putting up a big virtual billboard that said KILROY WAS HERE in front of the space.

'Somebody I should know?' Charlie said as he made sure the files were copied back to his space.

'Probably not,' Mark said, disgusted, 'and probably they won't, either.'

'There won't be any trace that it was you doing that, will there?' Charlie said, nervous.

'Are you kidding? Of course not. You think I want my dad to-' Mark gave Charlie a look. 'Never mind. Come on. Two more-'

They next hit the data storage system for the coroner's office in Queens. The City of New York system was surrounded with a set of nested security barriers so arcane that they actually kept Mark and Charlie away from the target data for a whole hour. Mark spent the whole time sweating and swearing-first in English, in language that Charlie wouldn't have thought Mark knew, and then in Thai, withgreat vehemence-as he dealt with the barriers, which in this implementation looked like layer after layer of barbed-wire fences, with long stretches of bare ground between them. But finally they fell, and the two of them found themselves making their way into a virtual domain that exactly duplicated the coroner's clerk's offices, right down to the potted plants and the baby pictures. The records Charlie found there were more complete than they had been anywhere else they had raided, and Charlie began thinking that they could have saved time by just raiding this one. But how would we have known? And I need all that other data to make sure the case is watertight…

Charlie was taking a moment to look more closely at one of the files he was carrying while Mark chucked other records one by one through his ring-of-fire 'copying' routine. He turned a page, and a great spill of organic- chemistry imaging and visualizations poured out into the air around them, long-chain molecules and imaging of translucent platelets and ribbony blood fractions. 'Just look at this toxicology report,' Charlie said, overcome with admiration. 'Somebody here is a real professional.'

'Yeah, well, so are their DP people,' Mark said, sounding actively nervous for the first time. 'Let's make it quick, huh?'