Death Match

friends, there’s no problem there…but I get a feeling that he doesn’t discuss the stuff that’s going on with the team with them all that much. If he suspects there’s a problem, maybe he’s afraid of involving them.”

“But not afraid of involving you,” her father said, suddenly sounding a little fierce.

“If I hadn’t made it plain I was interested,” Catie said, “he wouldn’t have taken the issue much further. I’m sure of that.”

Her father sat there for a few more moments, turning the lens over in his hands. “Well,” he said eventually, “your mom’ll be home from the library in a couple of hours…she and I will have a talk then.” He gave Catie another of those undecipherable looks. “Hold off on talking to George for the time being, okay?”

“Okay,” Catie said. “But we’re playing chess. If a move comes through—”

Her father allowed a slight smile to emerge. “All right,” he said, “deal with that, obviously.” He got up. “Mean-while I have to get on the Net and try to get some satisfaction out of Zeiss, who will doubtless tell me that I’m out of my mind, and why should they replace this optic again….” The smile turned into a very sour grin. “‘Customer service’…another of the great implied oxymorons of our time. Go on, honey, scoot out of here.”

Catie scooted.

She paused long enough to make herself a tuna sandwich, and while she was making it, considered her options. I might have to hold off on talking to George for the moment…but there’s nothing to prevent me talking to Mark Gridley. Assuming I can find the little twerp.

Catie finished the sandwich and had a Coke, then went off to the family room and sat down in the implant chair, and just vagued out for a moment or so. Her eye fell on the crack in the corner of the room, by the bookcase. Is that thing getting bigger? she thought. Really must mention it to Mom. Her father might do repairs and so forth around the house, but it was her mother who usually noticed such things needed to be done, and got them organized. She was, in most ways, the silent power in the family. Though Catie’s dad might come down hard in one direction or another, he rarely did so without consulting her mother first, except as regarded small things. And how’s she going to take this business with George? I wonder, Catie thought. Her mom could be unusually protective, sometimes. A little too much so, by Catie’s way of thinking. But then, if as Dad says we’re so much alike, it would seem that way to me, I guess….

Catie sighed and lined up her implant with the Net box, activating it. A moment later she was standing in the Great Hall, looking at her beat-up comfy chair, along with piles of e-mails and art projects that she hadn’t yet finished filing. It’ll have to wait. “Space—” she said.

“What, you again?”

She smiled grimly. “Get me Mark Gridley.”

“Checking his space for you now.”

She stood there looking at the various pieces of completed and half-completed artwork lying on the floor in their “iconic” forms. When was the last time I sat down and actually did some art? Catie thought. She could think of about fifty things that needed to be done to the Appian Way piece, especially after the talk she’d had with Noreen the other day. She hadn’t even had time to unshell the Luau lighting program—

Her own space suddenly dissolved away to darkness. A second or so later that darkness began to lift again, like a slow dawn, but though the ground under her feet, a dusty, pockmarked surface, began to pale, the “sky” did not.

A moment later Catie saw why. The sky was black, and full of stars that burned, unwinking, unhampered by any breath of atmosphere. The dusty, pale ground was more than just pockmarked. It was scattered with little chunks of rock, something porous and light-looking, like pumice, and the pockmarks weren’t just potholes, they were craters. The nearby ones were small, but there were bigger, walled ones further off — ancient impact craters, their insides impossible to see from where Catie stood, though here and there a “splash peak” from some ancient gout of lava caught in the act of recoalescing with its crater’s briefly molten bottom still stood up above the rim.

She looked around her, very impressed. Off to her left, nearly new, there was the Earth, a bright, blue- burning crescent, and ever so faintly its dark side, North America and the Pacific mostly, was lit by moonlight, the old Earth in the new Earth’s arms. Catie smiled slightly, and finished her turn.

There, off to one side, in the bottom of a crater about the size of a football field, stood a half-circle of white columns, in the fluted Doric style — Catie had done more than enough columns in her Appian Way piece, and knew Doric from Ionian when she saw it. Some of the columns were broken at their tops, and their capitals had fallen here and there. Other columns which should have completed the circle lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground like felled trees, shattered in their fall. In the middle of the circle, where the fluted remains of several columns lay across one another and left a little space, Mark Gridley was sitting on one column, as if on a bench, and leaning back against another. In the empty space before him a display window hung, and he was watching a football game.

Catie strolled over to him, raising dust, and stood by him for a moment, looking at the image. “Is this preseason,” she said, “or post?”

Mark snorted. “Who can tell anymore?” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Sorry I’ve been hard to find lately.”

“Don’t sweat it, Squirt, I’ve been busy, too.”

“So I hear.” He waved at the viewing window, and it went blank. “James Winters said you needed to talk to me about some things.”

“Yeah.” She sat down on another of the columns, making herself as comfortable as she could on the ridges. “At the moment, I need to know just what makes a ‘sealed’ server sealed.”

He grinned at her, an entirely happy look. “Want to break into one and find out firsthand?”

Catie had to sigh. “Mark, has anyone ever investigated whether you might possibly have some piracy in your background somewhere?”

“Might be, on the Thai side,” Mark said cheerfully. “There were some funny things going on in the Malay Straits late last century….”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“And my mom told me once that she was related to Grainne O’Malley….”

Who? But Catie refused to ask him if this relationship was a good thing. Once you got Mark started on some subjects, there was no stopping him.

“I’d prefer not to break in anywhere we’re not wanted,” Catie said. “Life is complicated enough at the moment. But I also need to talk to you about some structural issues.”

“That’s what Winters said,” said Mark. “So, shoot.”

“Well, first, the spatball servers. ‘Sealed’ how, exactly?”

“Triple-redundancy controls on access to the code,” Mark said. “And safe-deposit type security on the physical servers themselves — three-key access, with the highest officials in the organization holding the keys. It’s sort of like the way they used to handle missile launches last century. However,” Mark said, and smiled a completely unnerving smile, “any security that human beings devise, human beings can defeat. With time, and care, and enough brains.”

“Fishing for compliments, Mark?”

He didn’t deign to answer that. “As regards the ISF servers, though,” Mark said, “I can save you some time and worry. Net Force has already been through those with a fine-tooth comb.”

“Meaning you, I take it.”

“I went along for the ride,” Mark said. “Nothing showed up.”

“Did the software people who normally maintain the code know that you were coming?”

“No. Well, yes,” Mark said after a moment. “Upper management knew, since we were doing a physical- equipment assessment as well. In fact, the ISF asked us to come in as soon as Net Force contacted them.”

“Then we can assume that ‘lower’ management knew about the inspection, too,” Catie said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Seems likely enough. Assuming ‘worst case,’ anyway.”

“I think you may as well assume it. I suspect your dad would have, anyway.” Catie thought for a moment.