Death Match

server. Theoretically no one would be in there until tomorrow morning sometime — local time, anyway. That was the afternoon for her, since the server itself, and most of the techs who managed it, were on the West Coast. All the same, Catie was twitching as she held the key up. “Space?” she said.

“You’re gonna get in trou-bllle… you’re gonna get in trou-blle….” her workspace manager sang, sounding entirely too gleeful about it.

“Not nearly as much as Mark Gridley’s gonna be in when all this is over,” Catie said grimly. “He’s gonna wish the Surete had kept him to play with. Listen, you, just open a door to get me into the ISF server. The specs for the gateway are all right here. Don’t deviate, or I’ll pull your wires out, tie them to the tree in the front yard, and chase you around it.”

“Uh,” said her workspace manager. An open gateway popped into existence in front of Catie. Through it she could see darkness, with green lines drawn through it, running away to eternity….

“Keep this open in case I need to leave in a hurry,” Catie said.

“I, for one, intend to disavow any knowledge of your actions,” said her workspace manager helpfully.

“You do that,” Catie said, and stepped through the doorway into the dark of the spat-volume server’s space.

She spent her first few minutes there just standing, looking around her, listening, for any sense or sign that anyone else might be here. But Catie heard nothing, saw nothing, but the Cartesian grid running off in its single plane into the empty darkness. Finally she lifted the key and pushed it into the darkness.

Obediently it cracked open before her to show her the keyhole. She turned it, and found herself, not standing in space this time, but floating inside the spat volume at the heart of the “space station.”

“Workspace manager…” Catie said.

“Listening, visitor.”

“Please show me the schematic of the server software that I viewed when I was last here.”

The image of the spat volume around her faded away, leaving her standing on the Descartean plane again. But this time the server’s software structure towered up in front of her once more, a skyscraper’s worth of code, all represented once more as squiggles and bright colors and straight lines and wavy lines and spheres, like a spaghettiand-meatball dinner with aspirations to architecture. Catie heaved a big sigh. “All right,” she said to herself, “time to start trying to figure this thing out….”

She sat down on the green-lined “floor” and considered where to begin.

Elsewhere, hidden away in the depths of virtuality in a dim blue-lit bar that might or might not have genuinely existed somewhere else, two men more thoroughly wrapped in shadows than ever sat on either side of one of the marble tables and studied it and their drinks, trying to avoid having to look at one another. Even here, wearing seemings, neither of them raised his voice above a whisper…though the anger in their whispers plainly indicated that both of them would have liked to shout.

“…They shouldn’t have scored at all! Next time—”

“Forget next time for the moment! We’re not done with last time. And they did score.” Darjan was glaring at Heming. “What do I have to do to get through to you how important this is? You need to have these routines correctly implemented by Thursday, and the people handling them clued in about what needs to be done, or there’s going to be more than just your ass on the line, my friend.” The words were spoken in a way that had nothing friendly about it at all.

“So we’ll have them ratchet the response up a level or two.”

“Better make sure it’s ratcheted up enough….”

“Too much,” said Heming hotly, “and it’s going to start being obvious to the players. Then where will you be? You’ll have an independent investigation breathing down your back before you know what’s happened. Or worse still, Net Force will get involved. And then you, my friend, will find out what having your ass on the line really looks like.” He watched Darjan for his response.

Darjan just stretched his legs out and turned his glass around on the table a couple more times. “Get it handled,” he said. “There are enough bucks being bet on Chicago at the moment that it has to be right. The gentlemen upstairs want plenty of point spread on this result.”

“Look, I told you, it’s being handled right now. Correction has already been put in, and the techs are training on the ‘twinned’ server right now. They’ve even suckered some spatball players into helping them test the volume.”

“Are you crazy? If the ISF—”

“One of the people who’s been around to reassure them is ISF…or so they’ve been told. Our corporate connection.”

Darjan still looked uneasy. “If word of that gets out—”

“It won’t. Our connection has impressed on all his minor-league ‘helpers’ how important it is to keep the news about the new server quiet, so as not to spoil the big publicity push when ‘the people funding it’ make the announcement. But the testing has been going on for a couple of days now, and the players haven’t noticed a thing. You can practically pull the ball out of their hands and they assume it was their fault somehow.”

Darjan mulled that over. “All right. I wouldn’t mind seeing one of these test sessions.”

“I can set that up for you any time. They’re testing this afternoon, in fact. You can be an invisible watcher.”

“All right.” He took a drink of his virtual martini. “There hasn’t been anyone messing around with the genuine ISF server, has there?”

“No need. Their own people don’t have any reason to be there now. Their own routine checks have all passed off without incident. And there’s no reason we would put our own operatives in there, or anywhere near it, so close to the play-offs starting. There’s no need for it anyway. The ‘remote controls’ from our mirror server are all installed and ready to go.”

“Then why didn’t they work last time?” Darjan said. “Dammit, that should have been another clean win for Chicago. Is that damn team that inept?”

Heming frowned. “They can’t all know about the ‘adjustment,’” Heming said. “Unfortunately, a lot of them are honest. The team captain’s dropped some broad hints in the right ears, but that’s all he can do without having their own coach on his case. What do you want him to do, take out an ad on CNNSI saying ‘This is how the volume has been fixed so we can win?’ All he can do is direct play toward situations that our monitor can use to best advantage. After that, it’s still up to the team.”

Darjan breathed out, annoyed. “I suppose,” he said. “Well, I’ve made a visit or so myself in the past few days to see what can be done about the ‘honesty’ issue from inside several of the teams. We’ll see how those pay off.”

“And don’t forget about those ‘maintenance’ visits I told you about,” Heming said. “The installation of the conditional switching in the South Florida players’ Net machines. We’ve got three in already. Some of these guys are fairly anxious to make sure their machines are serviced before the play-offs…they’ve been making it easy for us, and we should be able to get the whole team seen to before they play anybody. The eavesdropping buffers we’re installing will telegraph the players’ physical movements to our monitor handling the mirror server a half a second or so before they go to the real one, and give our own handling routines a chance to react to their plays before they even actually happen in the spot volume. Think of it as insurance. Whatever happens, it’s a technology we can use elsewhere after these play-offs, in all kinds of sports.”

Darjan still didn’t look entirely reassured. “Well…it had better just go right this time, Heming. Otherwise your people and my people are the ones that will take the heat…and you and Iare inevitably going to get singed. If not burnt to a crisp.”

Heming shook his head. “Look, I understand your concern, but it’s handled. Come by this afternoon for the ‘training session’ and see.”

Darjan nodded, still frowning, and had another drink. Around the two of them, the shadows folded in close.

Two hours later Catie was still staring at the server software construct, from about halfway up its height — she had moved the “floor” up to look more closely at the way the solids symbolizing the images of the spat volume were hooked into the Caldera command substructure — and wondering, from the pain in her head, whether she was coming down with a migraine. Probably not, she thought. Mom said Gramma