She hesitated. So far she’d only hit on sparsely monitored public-access sites, sites where her presence would pass unnoticed as long as she didn’t do anything that made someone decide to take a closer look at the hit logs for the current time frame. Now, however, she was crossing into more delicate territory. Territory where there would be a price for sloppiness.
But that was why Nguyen had sent her, of course. Nguyen knew her. She’d told Li her career was riding on this mission and then she’d turned her loose, knowing she’d get the job done, knowing she was willing to risk everything on every throw, every time.
Five minutes later an obscure CanCorp research assistant sent a message to the network administrator. Six minutes later, Li opened a blind window on the administrator’s account and started surfing the internal mail archives of CanCorp’s entire R D division.
CanCorp security had been thorough, Li noted with a professional’s appreciation. They had good eSec protocols and they hadn’t been shy about slapping the wrists of employees who violated them. But researchers never took security seriously, and CanCorp’s researchers were no exception.
Three of the facility’s designers still had archived mail talking about a prototype device similar to Sharifi’s wire. The project had been terminated twenty-eight months ago. The one prototype of the interface had been sent to an off-site storage room from which, according to later inventories, it had simply… vanished.
Li cursed in frustration, surfaced briefly to a disorienting image of her quarters on-station, then plunged back in.
Let’s go at this from another angle, she told herself. Look for the organic component.
She accessed Sharifi’s medical records again and put together an itinerary for her last few months Ring-side. Then she cross-checked Sharifi’s whereabouts against all the clinics licensed to install the kind of specialized internal wetware Sharifi needed. Match: one discreet, expensive private clinic in the Zona Camilia.
The operation had been paid for from an unnumbered Freetown account. And twenty hours before Sharifi checked in, the clinic received a bonded and insured shipment of medical supplies from one Carpe Diem, an obscure colonial net-access provider that had never logged a single shipment to the Zona Camilia clinic before or after.
Carpe Diem turned out to be a bona fide though not particularly profitable operating company that held down a solid chunk of the civilian streamspace access market in the Lalande 21185 metaorbitals. Li quickly pierced its security perimeter and slipped into the internal operations database. She found exactly what should have been there: payroll, billing records, internal corporate documents, and a reasonably active unofficial e-mail dialogue to substantiate the actual existence of Carpe Diem’s alleged 479 on- and off-site employees.
But when she hacked the accounting department, she got a different story. Enough money was flowing through Carpe Diem to fund a small but technologically sophisticated war. Payments, large and numerous, some of them to the same players involved in installing Sharifi’s tech. And for every transfer out, the files showed a corresponding transfer in.
Whoever made the transfers had cared enough to cover their tracks. The incoming transfers were never exactly equal to the outgoing ones, and they showed up on the Carpe Diem accounts with lead times varying from two days to two months before the equivalent outbound transfers. It would have been extremely hard to prove a connection.
But Li didn’t need proof; she just needed a track to put her nose to.
She traced the money through two bankruptcies, five anonymous holding companies, and a string of numbered bank accounts scattered across eight star systems.
At one point she felt a presence, as if a great bird hung above her, rising on a strong head wind, the currents of cyberspace breaking across its pinioned wings. Something brushed along the edge of her mind. A blue-bright eternity of open spaces flashed before her eyes and was gone before she could even be sure she’d seen it.
‹Cohen?› she thought, then bit the thought back hurriedly. She was running in binary, deep in the numbers, dispersed over the net as far as an organic operator could risk spreading herself. She knew from experience that a mere thought could draw Cohen like chum drew a waiting shark. And she didn’t need him showing up. She wasn’t even close to ready to talk to him.
The money trail dried up in the heavily shielded datacore of an offshore account in Freetown’s finance sector. Li reset her safety cutout and crossed onto FreeNet before she had time for second thoughts.
FreeNet was older and wilder than the rest of streamspace. It was off the UN grid, ungoverned by the safety protocols of the white-market sectors, the virtual homeland of black marketeers, hijackers, infoanarchists, and the rogue AIs of the Consortium.
Li’s cutout offered some protection even there; if her vital signs changed too drastically, it would shunt her into a firewalled decompression program until it could get her safely off-line. But that only helped against outright net assassination. A cutout wouldn’t stop wet bugs. Li remembered Kolodny and shivered.
She spent half the day on FreeNet, riding the stream until her back ached and her eyes burned. All she found were firewalls, dead ends, cul-de-sacs. She cursed, fatigue bearing down on her. There were no answers here. Just boxes within boxes, questions within questions.
Common sense and the urge for self-preservation were both telling her to give up. The motto of the FreeNetters might be “Information seeks its own freedom,” but in practice FreeNet was made for hiding data, not finding it. And, like Freetown’s realspace streets, it was a place you could get killed for asking too many questions. Or asking any questions at all about the wrong people.
The hijacker nabbed her twenty seconds after she crossed back onto the UN grid.
The first sign of trouble was a subtle ripple in the numbers. Streamspace froze, shuddered, desynchronized around her. When it clicked back into place, she was nose to nose with a blue-eyed Hispanic face. Fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Baby fat padding jaw and cheekbone. Hard-edged, industrial-finish nose ring. Good unkinked genes.
Li breathed a virtual sigh of relief and relaxed. It was a Riot Grrl, some rich hacker wanna-be hot-dogging on her parents’ VR gear. Real danger was never this pretty, even in streamspace.
She smiled and shut down the window.
Nothing happened.
‹Out,› she sent. But there was no out.
Streamspace ground gears on her again. When it phased back in, the Riot Grrl’s eyes were changing color. Blue to brown, brown to near black. And the face around the eyes was changing. Shifting, melting, re-forming until Li was staring at a face she knew far too well. A face she’d last seen fifteen years ago staring back out of the streaky mirror of a Shantytown chop shop.
She ran, but the hijacker was too fast for her. A hand lashed out before she could turn and clamped down on her jugular.
She kicked and bit. She tried to shut down the VR window and couldn’t. She tried to drop out of VR into code so she could at least see what she was up against. She tried to shut down everything and found that her realspace feed had been disabled.
The hand twisted, shooting Li down into pain and darkness.
The pain in her throat eased, and she returned to something like breathing. She was crouching in a dark acrid-smelling place, holding something. Her head throbbed. She felt a dull, itchy sting in her lungs that reminded her of… someplace.
She couldn’t see clearly, and what she could see—tools, cables, a shadowy computer console—made no sense to her. She was moving, doing something with her hands, manipulating a piece of machinery whose function she couldn’t guess at. She strained to drag her gaze upward, to get some idea of her surroundings. Impossible. Her hands, her eyes, her whole body seemed to be moving of their own volition.