"We've been here . . . before?" Paul examined the naggingly familiar terrain,
"Not here, but something much like it—a place built for us to meet our host on neutral ground. You were not with us for the first one, Paul Jonas, but you must remember the second."
"The mountain!"
"Exactly." Martine showed him a ghostly smile. "And I hope that we will again find the Other waiting for us. Maybe this time we will understand how to speak to it."
"So where are we going?" Florimel asked. "The hills look like they're a little lower heading that way. . . ."
"They are," Martine said shortly. "But we do not need the hills or the slope of the ground to know. I can perceive a great concentration of data waiting out there, something alive and active and unparalleled, just as I could feel it waiting on the mountaintop." For a moment she looked very tired and fearful. "That is not quite true. It seems different this time—smaller, weaker. I . . . I think that the Other is dying."
"How can that be?" Florimel demanded, "It's just an operating system—it's code!"
"But if it like, sixes out, what happens to us?" asked T4b.
Martine shook her head. "I do not know, but I fear the answers." She led the others across the shallow valley and up the slope of the nearest hill. They had walked only a few hundred meters when Paul felt a prickling on the back of his neck,. as if something were following him. He whirled but he could see nothing behind him in the colorless hills. Still, something troubled the air, a tension, a tightening of pressure, that made him reluctant to turn his back again.
Martine also swung around, slowly, searchingly. She found a direction and cocked her head to listen for a moment.
"Run," she said.
"What are you. . . ?" Florimel began, then the sky split open.
From nowhere, winds howled down on them and the ground trembled. The trembling became general, the air and the earth all vibrating in shuddering synchronization, then something huge appeared on the hilltop they had just deserted, something vague and dark and beastlike. Heat lightning crackled around its misshapen head. The thing was on its knees, howling in rage and what sounded like pain, a barking roar that made Paul's ears throb. More winds came shrieking through the hills flinging horizontal dust, so that he had to cover his eyes with his hands and peer through the cracks in his fingers.
"I told you, run!" Martine screamed. "It's Dread! He followed us through!"
The vast figure on the hillside writhed in pain; its howl rose in pitch. "Something's fighting him!" Paul shouted. "The system! It's fighting back!"
"The system is going to lose!" Martine grabbed his arm and yanked him forward, leading him a few stumbling steps up the hill. The Wicked Tribe blew past, squealing helplessly on the breast of a gale wind. Paul turned to grab at Bonnie Mae, who had fallen; when he dared a look back he could see the immense, murky figure struggling to rise to its feet, outscreaming the storm winds, the lightning now flashing and snapping around its misshapen head.
Paul turned away from the sight and began to run. Behind him the roar of the beast rose and rose until all the world seemed to vibrate to a single animal cry of rage. The sky darkened. Overhead, the stars began to die.
Dulcie's heart was hammering.
What's he doing? What was he so worked up about? I've never seen him like that, even in the middle of the Atasco raid. Whatever it is, it's not even something real—it's something in the network, for Christ's sake. So why was he screaming at me?
She carefully closed her pad, waiting for her pulse to slow. He's not watching you, she told herself. She glanced at Dread's body, motionless except for the slow roll of the bed's machinery, but knew it proved nothing. He could be observing her through hidden cameras—maybe even through her own pad.
No, she told herself sharply. That's bullshit. Through the wallscreen, maybe, but he can't get into my own system—I have better security than most governments. If he was capable of that kind of gearwork he wouldn't need me in the first place.
Dulcie knew she wasn't going to be able to work until her nerves stopped twitching. She started the water boiling for a cup of Earl Grey. The old-fashioned way was slow, but she'd tried instant hot-pack tea. Once had been enough.
He doesn't know what you're doing, she told herself. And as long as you're careful, he's not going to. Just clean everything up.
But a more cautious side of her was not mollified. Why are you even doing it? Is it a challenge? Do you have to break into his private files just to prove you're better than him?
No, she decided. I have to do it because it's something he doesn't want people to know about—doesn't want me to know about. It's worth something to him, and if I can crack it and copy it, then maybe I have a bargaining chip. Something that will help me make a deal to get out of here safely.
Also, I'm tired of being kept in the dark.
When the tea was ready and her hands were steadier she took the cup and returned to the chair and small table she had set up in one corner of the loft. She could hear people laughing on the street below, music blaring from cars. She reflected wistfully on how much nicer it would be if she had been born a sensible young woman, someone who would be out with friends on a Saturday night instead of sitting in a silent loft with black-out curtains on the windows, playing caretaker to a moody, violent bastard like Dread.
She took a sip of tea and stared at her pad screen. Whatever password Dread was using had resisted every attempt. It was infuriating, almost unbelievable. A password? Even the most garbled collection of numbers and letters should eventually roll up as a combination on her random character generator, but for some reason it hadn't happened. And now that she had found a new bit of back-alley crypto gear to sniff out the shape of the password—nine characters—it was even more frustrating that she couldn't solve it.
In fact, it almost seemed impossible. Nine characters! It only took a short time for the gear to go through every possible combination of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks, but again and again it came up with nothing that would open the door to Dread's metaphorical locked room.
Remembering the lab tape and the strange, blurred experiment footage, she had also tried every variant on what she felt sure was his name, John Wulgaru. The gear should have generated the same things randomly as part of its algorithm, but she could not help feeling certain that the things he kept so scrupulously hidden, like his name and background, would have some connection to other things he wanted to keep secret from the world, for instance this bit of mysterious storage. But his name had not provided the key either, and before Dread had so unexpectedly and alarmingly interrupted her she had been inputting names from Aboriginal mythology, even though they too should already have been created by the near-infinite patience of the crypto gear.
Dulcie stared at the pad, then back at Dread's supine form, his dark Buddha face. It didn't make sense. Nine characters, but she had worked on it for hours without result. There was something she was missing—but what?
On a hunch, she went looking in her toolbox for a piece of gear she didn't often use, a strange little tangle of code even more esoteric than the one which had determined how many characters were in the password. A Malaysian hacker with whom she occasionally did business had traded it to her for a set of Asian bank personnel files she had downloaded while assisting a hostile takeover that ultimately failed. The would-be corporate pirates had been jailed in Singapore, and one of them had even been executed. Dulcie had made sure she would never be connected with the incident, but she hadn't been paid either, so she had been happy to unload the files anonymously and get something for them.