Death Match

with Chicago last time, much less draw with them.”

“Fine…we’ll take care of it. What about your invigilator?”

“I have a call to her scheduled for this afternoon, just before she goes to pick up her little honey from school. She’ll play our side, I think.”

Heming chuckled. “Well, then, we’ve got everything sorted out. This should be an interesting week….”

Catie came home from school in a most unaccustomed rush. Normally she took her time on the combined ride and walk, letting herself depressurize after the day’s work. Today, though, she came plunging in through the side door as if she were being pursued by wolves, and ran straight into Hal, nearly flattening him.

“Hey, look out, what’s the matter with you?” he yelled at her. “Hey, not in there, I was going to go online, you can’t—!”

Catie never heard what he said. She was in the implant chair, her implant lined up, within a matter of seconds. A few breaths later she was standing in the Great Hall. “Space—” she said.

“There you are,” said her workspace manager. “I’ve been worried sick. There’s a virtcall waiting for you. James Winters.”

“Oh, thank heaven. Mr. Winters—”

He stepped straight through into her space. “Catie. Sorry I couldn’t talk to you this morning. There were some things going on in the office.” He glanced around. “Are we private at the moment?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Do you have encryption?”

“Yes,” Catie said, “I use DeepSatchel—”

“Would you turn it on?”

“Space?” Catie said.

“Listening.”

“Go to encrypted mode and match to the remote encryption protocol.”

“Done.”

“Thanks,” Winters said.

“And give Mr. Winters a chair!”

The same one he had used last time appeared. He seated himself. “Did your mother tell you she was going to speak to me, the other day?” Winters said.

“Uh, yes,” Catie said. “It’s been kind of busy — we haven’t had a chance to touch base since then. We keep missing each other.”

“The curse of modern life,” Winters said. “We’re more connected than we ever were, but no one seems able to keep in touch, even in the same house. Well, anyway, she’ll have told you that she and your dad were happy enough for you to be working on this business, as long as due care was taken. Which obviously I promised her it would be.”

He bent a rather thoughtful look on Catie. She instantly broke out in a sweat.

“Uh,” she said. “Mr. Winters, I have a couple of things to tell you. But first of all, did you read what I sent you? It’s really important.”

“I read it,” he said. “We’re handling it. Some of our people are not too far from Karen de Beer’s house right now. We’ll be watching carefully to see if we can identify any visitor she has today…and whether they can be immediately identified or not, we’re going to have a little talk with them after they leave. Nothing to do with the visit, of course. There are very few people on this planet who’re perfect drivers, and some of our best operations on this continent start with the assistance of police officers who all of a sudden get very interested in someone’s broken taillight, or the thickness of the tread on their tires.” He smiled a very small smile. “Meanwhile, do you have anything else to tell me? My people and I have a busy evening ahead of us.”

“Uh…Yes,” Catie said, after what felt like one of the longest pauses of her life.

And then Catie told him about her access to the ISF server, and what she had found there.

During the fifteen or twenty minutes it took her to describe what had been going on, Catie watched Winters’s face with increasing concern and could see nothing there at all. He might as well have been a carved statue, for all the reaction he showed. It was rather terrifying. Some change of expression might at least have given Catie a hint as to how to slant her story to her own best advantage while still telling him the truth. But Catie realized very quickly that Winters was not going to help her out that way, not by so much as a millimeter’s worth of shift in the set of his face. So she told him the truth, as dryly as she could, with as little embellishment as she could manage; and then, when she ran out of truth, she just stopped.

Winters looked at Catie for a while without saying anything. It was probably only a few seconds. It felt like several years. And then he spoke.

“The gravitational constant,” he said. His tone of voice, to her astonishment, was almost admiring, and not of her, as far as she could tell, but of the people who had sabotaged the ISF server. “Talk about hiding something in plain sight.”

Catie, unable at the moment to do anything else, just nodded.

“So,” Winters said. “Where do you think this takes us?”

Catie gulped, then got control of herself again. “Sir, George said the changes in the way the ball was behaving weren’t constant. He said sometimes it seemed to act oddly, and sometimes it didn’t. That, taken together with all those different ‘definitions’ of the constant, makes me think that there’s someone, outside the server, using a remotely connected routine that acts as a kind of a switch. They watch the game, and throw the switch when it’ll do the team they’re backing the most good. Then they immediately put the constant back the way it should be again, so that no one will notice.”

Winters nodded. “It does seem likely.” He sat there brooding for a moment. “It would require some sophisticated programming calls to communicate with an outside source, probably some kind of mirror server, without triggering the ISF space’s own alarms that its home server is being tampered with. But it could be done. Certainly it can be done, because it would seem it has been.”

He looked at Catie then. “The one good thing about all of this,” he said, “is that you’ve succeeded, through a combination of persistence and sheer dumb luck, in isolating a problem that our whole investigative team, and even Mark Gridley, couldn’t find.” Then the look turned chillier. “While also trespassing into a private server space, accessing copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission, tampering with proprietary software, and possibly contaminating a crime scene.”

Catie gulped again as the face she had been wishing would show some kind of expression, a few minutes ago, now showed one all too plainly.

“That said,” Winters added, in a tone that was just slightly milder, “without what you’ve done, we wouldn’t have any way to prove it was a crime scene. So that weighs down the scale a little in your favor. But I wouldn’t get overexcited about that at the moment. Catie, this is not how we do business. This kind of stunt all too often results in criminals walking free when they would otherwise go for a long healthy sojourn in a residential facility with bars on the windows. Evidence must be acquired legally, right down the line…not just because that’s how we get useful results in our business, but because it’s right to do it that way. You follow me?”

Catie nodded, dumb.

“Now I have to work out how best to proceed here,” Winters said, and looked down at his folded hands, and was quiet for a few moments.

Catie stood there and said not a word. The silence in the Great Hall became deafening.

“The audacity of it,” Winters said then, “is just admirable. God knows how many virtual sports might have been subverted by this simple technique. But these guys have rolled it out too soon, on someone’s orders. Somebody with a favorite team got a real big bug up their — got very annoyed about something, and insisted that this big gun be deployed here and now…in a spatball tournament?” He shook his head. “I would have waited for the Fantasy Super Bowl. There’s real money in that. Spat’s barely taken off yet, by comparison.” Winters fell silent again.

“But what do we do now?” Catie said. “If we remove the instructions, that’s going to be great for South Florida, maybe, but it’s a one-time fix. Whoever put the altered instructions there will know we’re on to them, and go straight underground. You’ll never find out who did it, and they’ll just try it again, somewhere else, somewhere