But that was almost thirty years dead and gone, and recession and stock crashes had sent the old warhorse into darkness. The relic planes that had once stood on her decks were gone, sold off to collectors, and the ship itself had been left to rust. But like so many things, the people at the fringes of the city had found a use for her.
Anna had paid enough bribes to get the word of the day that let her on board. From the aft of the hangar deck, the sounds of a hammer-speed
DJ resonated down the echoing hull. Between here and there, the place they called "the wet market" blossomed like a multicolored fungus, dozens of makeshift stalls selling pirated datasofts, old tech, and recovered cyberware alongside oil-can cook plates crackling with hot fat and pungent foods from India, the Caribbean, or the African Federation. There was no law at the 86, but the New York Police Department tended to let things lie, providing that the residents kept themselves to themselves and made sure that any bodies washed up inside New Jersey's jurisdiction.
Anna skirted past the marketplace and found a corroded set of ladders that led up to the next level. The corridor she emerged in was gloomy. It smelled of rust and seawater. Following lines of peeling lume tape, she ascended again and emerged somewhere near the bow. A large section of the forward deck had been cut away and in its place there were a couple of jury-rigged geo-domes made of smart fabric. The sea smell gave way to the faint whiff of ozone and battery acid.
Inside the dome there was a parade of cowboy electronics; server frames modified like hot rods, chugging gasoline generators and fat trunks of cable snaking from fans of solar panels or military-issue satellite antennae. Monitors and holoscreens lit the space with cold blue illumination, and here and there, faces rendered ghost-white glanced up at her from laptops or gamer pits.
"Kel." She turned sharply at the sound of her cover name and saw Denny walking toward her. So dark-skinned as to seem almost coal-black, he was a short and stocky hacker with a shorn skull and an unkempt soul patch on his narrow chin. He had mirrored Kusanagi optics that gave his eyes the look of steel spheres. Following a few steps behind was a tall, rail-thin woman inside a doublet a size too large for her. She had thumbless spider-hands the color of old terra-cotta.
Anna gave Denny a nod from beneath her hood, watching the woman's face grow more sour the closer she got. In better light it was difficult to be sure how old the taller woman was. Interface sockets glittered in the half-light, making a line over her right temple.
"This is Kel," Denny was saying. "She's in the market for some intelligence."
He was going to go on, but his companion waved him into silence. "I am getting a distinct taste of blue in my mouth," she hissed. "You bring a cop on the boat? Are you an idiot?"
"Widow-"
"What?" Anna gave her a disgusted look, then glared at Denny. "This again? I thought me and you had gone through all that who-the-fuck are-you crap already." Kelso had targeted Denny through some files she'd skimmed from a contact at the DOJ, and worked him to get under this cover as "Kel," an out-of-towner looking to buy some information. She turned away. "Forget it. I don't have time for this."
"Kel, wait." Denny turned to Widow and glared at her. "She's clean. I ran her jacket. Not even a touch of blue."
Widow folded her thin arms. "Then she's definitely a cop."
Anna put on an angry snarl that wasn't all fake. "Who the hell is this skinny bitch and why am I listening to her talk? Didn't we have a deal,
Denny?"
"You know who I am?" Widow snapped back. "Go-Five, that's who I am. I'll rip your life open in ten seconds. Zero everything you ever owned!"
Go-Five meant GO5, also known as the Gang of Five. They were a collective of hacker guns-for-hire well known by the FBI's cybercrime division, with a lengthy rap sheet packed with all kinds of interesting digital larceny. The other interesting thing about them was that the Gang of Five were all faceless ghosts, which made it easy for someone to wear their name and reputation with little fear of being proven a liar.
"Bullshit," Anna retorted. "Go-Five are all Koreans, everyone knows that."
Widow snorted, and it was then that Kelso knew she had her on the line. The hacker community was driven by rep, and any one of them was only as good as their last score. Studying Widow in the actinic glow of the screens, Anna saw a woman trying to hide her age, running hard to keep up and not quite making it. She was maybe twenty if she was a day; old for a keyboard queen. All it would take to turn this around was to apply pressure to her vanity.
"I'm better than any K-towners," Widow said, doing the job for her. "Better than those Juggernaut dinks and that day-player Windmill."
Gotcha. "Prove it," Anna demanded, handing her a data spike. "Denny asked me to come here because he said you people could cut ice for me.
Can you do it or not?"
Widow snatched the spike from her hand, pale fingers with red enameled tips flashing. Inside it was every piece of information Kelso had, carefully stripped of any identifying markers that might show its origins from a law enforcement agency database.
"Get her money," growled Widow at Denny, and stalked over to a desktop setup.
The other hacker blew out a breath. "So we do it like you asked, right? Run the face on the file through the net, see what comes up."
"I need to know who he is."
Denny shrugged. "No guarantees, Kel. It's pay-for-play. Outcome is what it is. I told you that already."
"I need to know" she said, nerves bunching. Anna felt her mask of self-control slipping and took a moment to center herself. "If she's as good as you said…" Her mouth went dry and she drifted off for a moment. The jittering in her hands was coming back again, and she buried her fists inside the pockets of the hoodie. The other tell, that weird chemical taste in the back of her throat, like dry earth, was getting stronger.
Anna resisted the urge to reach for the ampoule pen in the pocket on the arm of the fleece and hunched forward. "Are we doing this or not?" she demanded, off the odd look Denny put her way. "Tick tock," she added, irritably.
Denny held out his hand. "Cross my palm."
She fished inside an inner pocket and came back with a credit chip imprinted with the logo of the People's Republic. The arfid strip in the card had been scrambled-a low-tech approach, to be certain, but enough that it rendered the transaction untraceable. The hacker made it vanish.
"How long is this gonna take?" Anna went on, her tone turning brittle.
"Not long," he offered, eyeing her, catching her manner. "Hey, Kel… If you, like, need something, I can speak to some of my people-"
She turned away, walking toward the fabric walls of the dome. The offer tempted her more than she wanted to admit. "You know what I need,
Denny," she said over her shoulder. "I need a name for that face."
Aerial Transit Corridor-Smolensk Oblast-Russian Federated States
Through the oval window of the pressure door, Saxon could see the morning light crossing the landscape far below, chasing the aircraft as it flew eastward. By the time they reached their destination, the dawn would have overtaken them, but for now the rising sun was still at their backs, visible in lines of color that illuminated the thin strips of clouds passing beneath. The view tilted as they banked gently, and Saxon put out his right hand to steady himself. He was still being careful with the cybernetic limb; it was a military specification model manufactured by Tai Yong
Medical, one of-if not the-biggest augmentation conglomerates on the planet. Along with new Hermes legs to replace those he'd damaged in the veetol crash six months ago, the upgraded Samson-series arm and a few other implants were all part of what Namir had called his