Carl Sargent - Black Madonna

The second smart frame got to work on the encrypted barrier, decoding and analyzing, Michael desperate to get at the data in the vaults. He got through just as the evaluate program gave him the final feedback.

“Bugger, it’s not here,” he growled. “We’re going to have to wait for the dove to fly back. Well, let’s face it-it would have been too easy to find it here.”

Obligingly, the bird flew back into the room, as a confused system decker exchanged attacks with a smart frame in the road outside.

“I think I hear sirens” Geraint said anxiously.

“Bollocks,” Michael said flatly as he took the tourist map from the bird’s beak. “Down the high street and make for the travel agency. Travel agency? I like that! Very eccentric humor. They must have an Englishman on the programming staff.”

“Not that I know of,” Geraint said. “Listen, there are sirens.”

“So there are, old man. Well, let’s get moving. The back door, I think.”

They got out of the datastore and raced down the side road, into the commercial district, Cars sped along the highway, data packets headed along the vast freeway of Renraku’s innermost computer systems.

“Look, never mind subtlety,” Michael said, extracting a grenade from his case and lobbing it at the doors of the

travel agency. “No more sleazing. Let’s just frag everything that moves.”

“Sometime I wonder whether you haven’t been living in America too long,” Geraint muttered, keeping his gun leveled at their backs. The doors blew off the in a splendidly agreeable cloud of dust and debris. Michael was already halfway into the place.

“Find it, find it!” he urged on his evaluate program. The customized program, specifically instructed to search for data on system intrusions, was already scurrying to the locked cupboards. It took the form of a rat in the sculpted system. Halting before one securely fastened cupboard in the distance, the rat raised up on its hind legs, sniffed, and twitched its whiskers.

Michael pried the lock off the door, and began shoveling files into his voluminous case. The first gunshots began to splinter the windows.

“Get to the fragging back door!” Geraint urged as he let off a flurry of his own shots at the advancing figures just visible outside. The armor won’t last forever.” He scooped up a last handful of files as they blew their way out the back door and found themselves in an alleyway.

“Whoops,” Geraint said as he looked at the cul-de-sac. A platoon of police were running at them from the far end.

“This program cost me half a million nuyen and it had better bloody well work,” Michael muttered grimly as he yanked open the doors of the mechanic’s shop opposite and raced into the gloom. He opened the door of the vehicle and started the ignition. Geraint had already flung himself into the passenger seat and flattened himself as close to the floor as he could. The armored car advanced into the street, performed a tire-screeching ninety-degree turn and raced toward the policemen. It scattered them far and wide, sprays of bullets bouncing off its armor as Michael raced the thing toward the outskirts of town again. Then, extraordinarily, he stopped and opened the driver’s door. A policeman was approaching from the side of the road.

“What the hell-”

“Trojan horse, old man,” Michael said as he handed over his case to the smart frame. “They almost certainly have special locks on data loss, and we may have trouble getting out with the data not ending up degraded. But Simon here won’t have any problems.

“Simon?”

“Give them names, helps me remember what does what. Simple Simon-simple to get data out with.”

“Doesn’t make any sense to me,” said the mystified Geraint.

“Doesn’t have to, it only needs to make sense to me.” Michael pointed out. “Now we have a roadblock to get past and, by the sound of it, half of Renraku’s best are on our tails.” The sirens got louder behind them.

“Now, let’s go knock down that barrier!”

“Well, it wasn’t traceable of course,” Radev said consolingly as he lit another of his endless chain of cigarettes. “But then we wouldn’t expect it to be. If it had been, we’d have been very disappointed. After all, we do pay him to get into other people’s systems without being traced, so at least we know he does what he does for us rather well.”

“Fine,” Kryzinski growled. “And the data?”

“The data in the proximity of the invading personas was transformed by the morphic encrypters at one hundred percent efficiency,” Radev smiled. “He will learn that what we told him was almost correct. If it had matched exactly he’d have been suspicious, of course. Now he’ll think we had a slightly more serious system invasion than we told him we had, and we won’t have to worry about being compromised by our own operative.”

“Good.” Sam sighed happily. “He’s good, we’re good, everything’s just fraggin’ hunky dory. Apart from twenty billion nuyen or you can all expect to wear brown pants for a fortnight.”

“We’ll have to see Sutherland’s initial report,” the Bulgarian replied. “It should conform to the initial assessment we have and then we can proceed from there.”

Kryzinski yawned and looked at the clock. He resented having to work beyond his normal shift to be on hand when Sutherland’s anticipated system intrusion occurred.

“I’m going home to get some sleep,” he sighed. “That’s enough excitement for one day.”

“Our bosses will be pleased,” Radev said consolingly, giving him a nicotine-stained smile.

“They’d fragging better be!” Kryzinski said fervently.

Michael keyed in the final instructions for the frame-analyzers and sat hack triumphantly. Getting out of the system had been easier than he’d expected. The tar pit program that had nearly trapped their car had been the least he’d expected and the attack utilities barking gunfire at the roadblock had been almost disappointingly easy to fend off. Now it was five in the morning and dawn was still an unfulfilled promise. Fresh coffee was just arriving, and gleaming dark bottles of port seemed to be making suggestive invitations to him from the table opposite, but after two days of slotting around with his body clocks, certain minor visual hallucinations were entirely acceptable. Geraint, having already used some minor booster or stabilizer through the cannula implant in his neck, took a shot of something psychoactive to prevent that happening, but Michael preferred a less direct route. Caffeine and alcohol into the gut would do fine, and he lit one of Geraint’s gold-banded cigarettes to add to the cocktail.

“They never saw it. What a bunch of dodos!” he smirked.

“Don’t get arrogant,” Geraint warned. “Wait to see what the discrepancies are. Don’t celebrate the data haul until you’ve seen it.”

“What we came out with was vanilla,” Michael protested. “What the Trojan horse will come out with is-”

Text was already filling the thirty-inch auxiliary screen. It scrolled through the initial sections of the inhouse Renraku evaluations in synchrony with the accelerated lasprint output until Michael keyed the screen to hold. He read fast. The blood drained from his face.

“Holy Mother of God!” he croaked, his hands grasping the edge of the table as if it were the edge of a cliff and he was about to fall off. “Look at this.”

Geraint leant over his shoulder, taking in the formal, emotionless language of the Renraku summarizer.

Total system invasion and collapse has been evaluated from corporate core systems with the following probabilities: Renraku, 100% known and evaluated; Fuchi, 100% with no error; Shiawase, 99% with error estimate +/- 1%; Saeder-Krupp, 99% +/- 1%…