Lisa Smedman - The Lucifer desk

The more Carla thought about it, the less certain she was that robbery had been the motive for this break-in. The intruders had overlooked just about every valuable in the place. Oh, sure, they’d taken all her simsense games and a few of her computer chips as well-the kind of thing kids usually went for. But these hadn’t been kids. They were professionals. They’d gotten past her voice recognition system-and it was a good one, not likely to be fooled even by a digital recording-as well as the motion detectors and sensor unit in the hallway. To get that far and not be detected, the intruders had to be good. And motivated.

Carla suddenly realized what they must have been after. If she hadn’t been so tired, she’d have guessed it right away. While she’d been out knocking on Mitsuhama’s doors, the corporation had come to her. She hurried into the bedroom and picked up from the floor the jacket she’d worn yesterday. She slid a hand into its pockets. Empty. The intruders hadn’t gotten what they’d originally been looking for, but they’d taken the next best thing. The chip onto which Carla had copied the spell was gone.

It didn’t matter that much. Aziz still had the original, and she could always get it back from him. And the cops had a copy; they’d demanded one as soon as they saw the story. In the meantime, the intruders had probably been fooled into thinking they’d gotten the original. One datachip looked much the same as any other, and the one Carla had used for the copy was bronze, just like the original. Since it contained the spell formula the intruders were looking for, they probably wouldn’t be back. They’d taken all her other memory chips, too, even though all they had to do was pop them into the telecom unit to see what was on them. But perhaps they’d wanted to be in and out quickly.

It was annoying to lose the other chips. The simsense games had been expensive, and the home trideo she’d shot of her niece couldn’t be replaced. As for the rest of the chips, they were all blank except…

“Oh, drek,” Carla moaned, closing her eyes. “Not my personal stuff.”

But they’d found it. The drawer where Carla hid her “private” recordings had been overturned. The chips she’d stuffed into the back of it, behind her neatly folded sweaters, were gone.

She sat on the bed, looking up at the ceiling-at the spot where decorative, tinted glass blocks hid the lens of a holocamera. The closed-circuit camera was automatically activated every time anyone came into the bedroom. Carla used it to record her romantic encounters, then later would replay and savor her favorite moments. She wasn’t sure if it was the reporter in her, compelling her to record her affairs, or some weird sexual kink. But it didn’t matter now. Somewhere, somebody was no doubt having a good laugh at her expense, titillating themselves by watching her private recordings. Or perhaps the chips were already on their way to a porn shop. Or perhaps to a rival trideo station for broadcast on the evening news.

Carla groaned and threw her head into her hands. How could she have been such an idiot? She should have erased those chips long ago, or disconnected the holo camera before the intruders…

The intruders! The camera would have recorded them! Carla dragged a chair over to the spot beneath the hidden camera and clambered onto it. Reaching up, she swung aside the false front of the glass block. She hit the power-off key for the camera, then popped the chip out of it. Carrying it to the living room, she slotted the chip into her home editing equipment and hit the Play icon. She had to skip around a little bit; the first track she viewed showed her sitting on the bed, staring up at the camera, while the next one she jumped to was of a romantic evening from three weeks ago. But at last she found the right track. She watched, leaning forward for a good look at the screen as the first of the intruders entered the bedroom.

The camera was looking down on the room, and thus it caught the top of the man’s head and shoulders from an overhead angle. But by using the logic-rotation system built into the holo unit, Carla could fill in the rest, patching together a composite from the images the camera captured as the intruder moved around the room.

He was human-a Native American-perhaps in his mid-twenties. His hair was crewed to sharp points, and he had a black bird tattooed across the back of his right hand. His left hand was gleaming chrome. He wore jeans, a brown leather jacket with fringed sleeves, and heavy black boots. He had paused only briefly to scan the room, then moved immediately to the dresser and began methodically opening and dumping its drawers.

After a minute or two, a voice called from another room. Carla paused the recording, skipped back a few seconds, then boosted and sharpened the sound.

“Found anything, Raven?”

The crew-cut intruder sorted through the clothes on the floor, picking out datachips. “Yeah,” he answered. “But there’s more than one. Any idea what color it was?”

“It looked bronze in the broadcast,” the other voice instructed. “But grab anything you can find. They might have used another chip for the story, just to be cute.”

“Do you really think this is worth it, Kent?” Raven called back. “The reporters might have lied about what was on the chip. We may not find anything here to interest Ren-”

“Don’t be such a fragging pessimist,” the off-screen voice said. “Of course the spell is valuable. And even if its not, what do you care? I’m paying you well enough, aren’t I?” The voice grew louder as a figure moved into the camera’s field of view. Once again, Carla let the recording run, selecting pieces to edit together into a composite image.

The second man was a pale-skinned elf with thinning blond hair tied back into a scraggly ponytail. He looked to be in his late thirties, and wore baggy trousers, a white shin, and a black opera-style rain cloak. A fiber-optic cable with a universal port hung out of one pocket, and his hands were sheathed in surgical gloves-probably to avoid leaving fingerprints.

He bent over to fish out a datachip that had fallen under the dresser. Carla, watching the screen, winced as he slipped it into a pocket. She hoped it wasn’t the recording of the guy who’d wanted to…

Raven was talking again. “So let me get this straight. The mage hired you to extract him so that his bosses wouldn’t geek his family after he spilled the beans on their hush-hush research project. He was gonna ask the newsies to make the interview Look like a tape they’d gotten from his kidnappers, right? So how come he got himself scragged?”

The elf leaned against the door frame. His eyes scanned the room warily. “You sure you disconnected the security system?” he asked.

Carla held her breath, hoping they wouldn’t stop talking.

The first man glanced up, a smug expression on his face. “I’m sure. Ain't that why you hired me, chummer? For that-and to crawl around on the floor, searching for chips so you wouldn’t get your nice clothes dirty?”

The elf gave him a thin smile. “You want to know why he got geeked? Use your wetware. It’s simple. Obviously Mitsuhama learned what their golden boy was up to and decided to shut him up. But in doing so they let the genie out of the bottle. Now everyone knows the secret-even if they don’t know whose secret it is. That was sloppy of them, overlooking the datachip in his pocket.”

From inside the closet, the other man made tsk tsking sounds. Silly fraggers.” he said in a mocking voice. “Rule number one: always check the pockets.” He stepped out of the closet, one hand rifling the pockets of a pair of Carla’s pants. He tossed them playfully at the elf, then began rummaging through the other garments.