“I don’t suppose he left her a Net address,” Catie said.
“He said he’d come back in a few days and see what she had to say.” George looked at his move as if he was most dissatisfied with it. “He told her not to mention it to anyone, or there could be trouble. She told me…and now she’s scared. But she would have been scared even if she hadn’t told me, she said. And she’s scared for her little girl, too, for Carmen. Karen’s not stupid. She knows trouble when she sees it. She temporized…out of shock, I think. She was never in any doubt that she wanted nothing to do with the offer. But now she’s afraid of what the guy might say if she tells him no.”
Catie swallowed. This was something that James Winters was definitely going to need to hear about. As long as no one notices them contacting her… But naturally Net Force would have ways to do that discreetly.
She swallowed again. “I don’t suppose that anyone else on the team’s had anyone approach them that way,” Catie said.
George shook his head. “If they have, I haven’t heard about it. Got another move?” he said.
“I’m thinking about it.” But strategizing her next move was actually buried behind four or five other, more immediate concerns at the moment.
When she looked up, she found George looking at her again. It was another of those distressed expressions, though this time he was at least trying to hide it. To Catie, the effect was simply as if he now had NOT REALLY UPSET painted on his forehead…and suddenly she knew what the problem was, or thought she did.
“Look, I—”
“George,” Catie said, sounding extremely severe and for the moment not caring, “it’s not like that. You think you have a monopoly on ‘not married, not dating, not gay, and no plans’?”
He just kept looking at her. Then he sagged. “Uh,” he said, “maybe I’m doing you an injustice. It’s just that it’s rare…and seems to be getting rarer…to find friendship, in my situation. Just plain friendship. Sorry.”
“Well,” Catie said, and let it sink in for a moment. “All right. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Tomorrow morning is the draw. The play-offs will start on Thursday at the soonest, maybe Friday. Karen’s going to have to do something. I’ve got to find a way to protect my team….”
“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Catie said after a moment, “let me know.”
George got up slowly, looking down at the chessboard again.
“Call me when you have a move,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
And he went through the door that had been standing waiting for him off to one side, in the air, and it closed behind him.
Catie sat very still for some while, considering possible moves in two very different games.
6
She took the predictable amount of teasing about being late for dinner, and Hal punished her for this slight on her father’s cooking by the most straightforward means possible — eating most of the lasagna and leaving Catie just enough for one serving, and nothing at all for seconds.
When she complained, her father threw his hands up. “It’s all I could do to get him to leave the pattern on the plates,” he said. “At least there’s some sauce left. Make some pasta.”
Normally a turn of events like this would have left Catie furious. Tonight, though, she simply made pasta, completely confusing Hal, who had been expecting — looking forward to, in fact — a far more explosive response. When Catie finished gobbling up her pasta and went straight back into the family room to use the Net machine, she heard Hal saying under his breath to her father, “You think she’s coming down with something?”
She ignored him, got straight back into her workspace, and got back to work reviewing Caldera. Several hours passed, at the end of which her brain was buzzing with commands and obscure syntaxes that she had never thought she’d need any time soon.
But I need them now, she thought, getting up out of the Comfy Chair at last and picking up, from the floor beside the chair where she had left it, Mark’s shining green key.
She pulled down a window to check the schedule he had sent her of the maintenance schedule for the ISF 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 Sureté 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.