A real, heartfelt grin spread across Dobbs’ face. “Right behind you, Houston.”
In the data hold, Lipinski dismissed Odel with three words and a hard look. When his relief retreated, Lipinski sealed the hatch and set the entry light glowing red.
His expression was all business as he sat down at Station One.
“So, what’s out here?” The touch of his pen lit the boards up. A spidery diagram of red, white and green lines drew itself across the main screen. The green lines were collected in a small bundle that sent short fingers into the big, loosely knit cluster of white threads. The long strands of red vanished off the side of the screen.
“Bank lines.” Lipinski traced the fat red lines with his forefinger. “Us.” He tapped the tidy green net. “You guys.” He tapped the white. “Or at least, what you’ll let anybody see of you guys.” He frowned at the screen and then glanced up at her. “But I don’t really have to explain any of this to you, do I?”
Dobbs gave him a small smile. “Not really.” She leaned closer, trying not to be acutely aware of the heat radiating off his skin. She forced her attention to the scanty web of straggling white lines. “That’s not even ten percent of the Guild Net,” she told him. “And actually, I’m surprised you can see that much.”
“Trade secret. A concept I’m sure you’re familiar with.”
Dobbs winced and clutched her shoulder. “A hit, a hit. She’s losing air,” she said, more from habit than for performance sake. She didn’t take her gaze off the screen. “And, of course none of the gateways are on there.” She lowered her hand and drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the edge of the board. “Can you show me what you’re using to get this map?”
“There goes my trade secret.” Lipinski wrote out the recall command. A searcher blueprint appeared on one of the secondary screens.
Dobbs studied the objects and connectors. Unconsciously, she tapped the board as if trying to reach through it to the schematic beneath. She stopped as soon as she realized that was what she was trying to do. She wanted to pick this thing up, to wrap her understanding around it and know it in an instant. She stuffed her hand into her pocket and forced herself to drink it in with just her eyes.
“Not half bad, for a beginner.” The remark earned her an angry, unguarded snort from Lipinski. Actually, the searcher was neatly built; solid, compact and comprehensive. It just didn’t go far enough. “You need to attach three more runners,” She pulled out her pen and marked the spots with points of light on the board. “Here, here, and here. Then you need an anchor and chain, here.” She sketched in the construction. “And a whole herd of sniffers out here.” She speckled the outer edge of the blueprint. “And you need to spread it out. Keep the objects as far apart as possible.”
Lipinski frowned. “It’ll be too big. They’ll spot it in a second.”
“They’re looking for speed. Flashes will attract security. If we trickle our searcher in there and go as slow as possible, we might just get by. Especially since they won’t be looking for you.” She twirled her pen through her fingers. “You couldn’t possibly know the way in.”
“Your Guild’s an arrogant bunch, aren’t they?” Lipinski pulled the searcher over into an active buffer and set to work, sketching orders with his right hand and tapping keys with his left.
I didn’t used to think so, thought Dobbs, but she didn’t say anything. She slid into the chair in front of the relief boards and activated them. “I’m going to bring in a couple of things from my desk to help, all right?”
“Sure,” he said without looking up. “The more the merrier.”
I hope so. She called up a pair of trackers she had built herself. They were small, light and slow as molasses. In the net activity that surrounded the Guild, they’d be no more than ripples in the stream.
She bit her lip to keep herself from asking Lipinski how he was doing and concentrated on checking over her own handiwork. This was no time to leave holes. When she’d finished her checks, she altered the trackers’ entire search routine. They had originally been designed for finding viruses and invaders. Now they would look for an entranceway.
As little as she liked it, Dobbs saw no choice but to go in through the Drawbridge. There were several windows and back doors, but those were used exclusively for getting out of Guild Hall in a hurry. Anything trying to get in that way would be infinitely more conspicuous than anything trying to get in through the heavily trafficked drawbridge. Which was, of course, part of the point of having them. Given time, Lipinski might have been able to spot one of the windows and attempt to make use of it, never knowing he had signaled his presence by going entirely the wrong way.
Finally, Lipinski said, “Is this more to your liking, ‘Dama?”
Dobbs leaned across. The blueprint had all the additions she’d suggested and he’d managed to extend the connectors even farther than she’d hoped. Guild security was not so different from other programs. Information shot through the Fool’s network in packets, just like any other network. So, Guild security looked for fast, free-moving blips. It also looked for the large, solidly compressed masses of Fools. Slow-moving strings and shadows might just get by as background noise, especially if they could find something large and non-sentient to trail behind.
“That’s perfect, Lipinski,” she said, meaning it. “What I want to do is send the trackers to find the front door and then send your searcher in after them.”
“Trackers?” Lipinski’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean you don’t know the way into your own Guild?”
“No, not from out here, I don’t,” she confessed. Lipinski didn’t actually squirm, but he obviously did not like being reminded so abruptly of her — How to put it? Dobbs wondered. — Special access privileges.
“All right.” Lipinski lifted his hands away from the board and leaned back in the chair. “It does make me wonder why I’m here though.”
Dobbs laid her hand on her breast and mustered a shocked look. “Well, you don’t expect me to drop these things into that soup do you? Yuch!” She shook her hand as if trying to clean something off it. “I’m just here to tell you what to avoid.”
“Oh, great. Now you’re not only a Fool, you’re a ground-side pilot.” Lipinski leaned forward. Dobbs rewarded his quip with a soft chuckle. Lipinski pulled Dobbs trackers over to his active board. She had already opened their authorization to him, so he could set them in motion immediately.
Dobbs slaved her monitors to his boards so she could see what he saw, and to some extent control it. She blanked out the heading on one of the keys and wrote FREEZE across it. On the board, she wrote the series of commands that could halt the searcher and attached them to the re-named key.
Lipinski’s gaze flickered to the new label, and then up to her face.
“If I see anything suspicious, I want to be able to stop the searcher without having to yell at you.”
Lipinski accepted that with a shrug. He didn’t waste any more time. He focused the main view screen on one of the few threads of light that ran from the Guild to the Pasadena.
Enlarged, the image fractured. Instead of steady lines, it looked more like a cluster of fireflies, some of which carried long strings between them.
The graphic, Dobbs knew, was little more than a crude map. It could give general locations and a decent overview. The vital information was contained in the long columns of numbers that appeared on the secondary boards. Those indicated load shifts, capacity, and new entries, as well as the nature of the packets swarming around them.
Dobbs could read all of it, if she had time. The Guild drilled the codes into all of its members. Lipinski, though, could take it all in at a glance, as if it were printed English. That, more than anything else, was the reason she needed him. Perhaps she could find the data she needed using her own searchers, but Lipinski could find it faster, and time was most definitely of the essence.