Melissa Scott - Trouble and Her Friends

“There’s a major sweep on,” van Liesvelt continued, “ID checks, body scans, toolkit search, pattern matching—the works and then some. The warning went up on all the boards for anyone ever connected with Trouble to lie low, but I figured, since I’d heard you went legal, you might not get the message. And, of course, I didn’t dare risk the mail.”

“You figured right,” Trouble said. It had been months— maybe as much as a year—since she had last logged on to any of the temporary BBS, the pirate bulletin boards where most of the virtual economy functioned and the illegal and quasi-legal jobs were traded. She had kept a low profile, not even lurking, her presence dimmed until she could barely feel the virtual winds, barely taste the data, relying purely on the visual images rather than the brainworm’s translation. She frowned, adding up the points where her new identity intersected with the old. There were more of them than she liked, and she could feel her frown deepen. “How’s the check being run?”

“On-line, mostly,” van Liesvelt answered. “But there are some offline checks as well, following up on this new Trouble’s contacts.”

I wonder if any of them are being made up this way? Trouble thought. She put that aside, something to deal with in the morning when she could ask a few discreet questions of the sheriff’s computer flunky, and said, “Thanks, Butch. I appreciate the warning.”

Van Liesvelt shrugged, reached for his glass again. “You’re family. All us queers have to stick together.”

Trouble smiled. “How’d you get up here? You need parking, or transport home tomorrow?”

“I left my bike in the woods,” he answered, and waved vaguely toward the stand of trees that stood invisible beyond the metal shutters. “I figured nobody would want it bad enough to chop down a whole tree for it.”

Trouble felt the laugh catch in her throat. Van Liesvelt had come up from the city on his ancient motorbike, almost an antique already, three hundred miles in the rain, to warn her that someone was using her name, and that she might catch some fallout from it. She touched his shoulder gently, and he looked up in surprise. “Thanks,” she said again, softly, and van Liesvelt shrugged, looked embarrassed and pleased all at once.

“Like I said, we got to stick together.”

There was a chair that folded out into a narrow mattress in the oversized closet that passed for a second bedroom. Trouble found sheets and a blanket, and pulled the second quilt and the extra pillow from her own bed to make up a serviceable extra bed. Van Liesvelt protested, but only for form’s sake, and she left him to strip and went on into her own room. She undressed slowly, her mind still busy with van Liesvelt’s warning. It had been three years since she’d… retired. It had seemed the thing to do at the time: corporate security had been getting better, as were the various law enforcement groups—Treasury, Interpol, ECCI, ko-cops and all the rest—assigned to watch the nets, and then Congress had rejected the Amsterdam Conventions in favor of Evans-Tindale, making convictions possible and even commonplace. Even before Evans-Tindale, things had been going badly. She could still remember the shock, the taste of it, bitter fear, when she’d heard that Terrel was actually going to jail on an armed robbery charge, just as if the icebreaker in his kit had been a gun… Cerise had said that it was stupid to panic, that blind drunk they were better than Terrel was at his best, but Trouble had been certain then that things had changed. Eight months later, Evans-Tindale had passed, and she had been out of the business for good, and on her way to reestablishing her original identity, alone.

She sighed, and crawled into bed, waving her hand through the signal beam to cut the lights. She could hear the rain, louder now, here under the roof, and, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, her furniture became familiar shadows. The courtyard lights cast a faint pattern on the far wall, even through the curtains. I don’t want to leave, she thought, I like it here. The co-op had been a safe harbor, a quiet, easy refuge—dull, but there had been something comforting about the very predictability of the routine. Maintaining the local net, shepherding the co-op’s business through the nets: it was easy, and she would regret losing it. She made a face in the dark, annoyed with herself, turned noisily onto her side so that she was looking at the blank wall. If I was really that contented here, I wouldn’t’ve turned the brainworm back on—wouldn’t’ve been out on the net tonight. So where does that leave me?

She had been careful when she retired, had taken seven months to reestablish herself, her new/old identity, before she’d gone back onto the nets, and by that time she’d created jobs to explain the time she’d been invisible. The documentation for those jobs was the weakest link, of course—some of it was outright forgery, like the six months she’d supposedly spent waiting tables in Seahaven, and all of it depended on “employers” being unable to remember their minimum-wage help clearly enough to notice that she’d bought someone else’s workcard. Still, an early adulthood spent hopping from one low-pay, no-status job to another wasn’t particularly uncommon, especially for artists, and the story that she’d told the co-op when she applied to run their networks for them was not inherently implausible. Kids dropped out of school all the time to try to make it in the arts, and found out too late that their talents didn’t lie in that direction at all. When the Treasury cops showed up—if, she amended, without conviction—she would just have to hope that the story held up. It had held up when the local sheriff’s office had run the security check that cleared her to receive a syscop’s license. But the sheriff’s office doesn’t exactly check things out as carefully as Treasury will , a voice whispered in her mind. She ignored it, and disciplined herself to sleep.

She woke in the chill light of dawn to hear someone tapping on the doorframe. She sat up, blinking, to see van Liesvelt peering in at her.

“I got to be going,” he whispered, and Trouble shook herself fully awake.

“Why? You’re welcome to stay for breakfast, have some coffee, at least…”

She had spoken in her normal voice—there was no one around to hear—and to her relief van Liesvelt did the same. “No, thanks anyway. I have to be back in the city by noon.”

“So you could leave at seven,” Trouble began, and van Liesvelt shook his head.

“There’s some people I’ve got to see first. And I want to be out of sight of here before full light, anyway.”

That was a kindness, and Trouble was briefly ashamed of her own relief. “If you’re sure,” she said, and threw back the covers. “I’ll let you out.”

She padded down the stairs behind him, shivering a little in the thin T-shirt, unlocked the back door, and then fiddled the security system to let him past the main perimeter sensors. Van Liesvelt walked away across the damp grass toward the stand of trees where he’d left his motorcycle, his disreputable jacket flapping loose around him. He turned back once, lifting his hand in casual farewell, and then disappeared back into the shadows of the trees. Trouble waited until she was certain he’d had time enough to pass the perimeter, counted off five more minutes by the kitchen dock, then reset the security system and went back to bed.

She woke again at nine, feeling somewhat more in control of things, and showered herself completely awake. She dressed, and headed across the compound to the community hall where the news-service machine was kept. It was a cool morning even in the sun, and the maples outside the compound were already showing a few yellow and flame-red leaves among the general green, bright contrast against the vivid blue of the sky. The rain had left the air unexpectedly clear, and she could hear the hum of traffic on the feeder fly-way that ran less than two kilometers from the compound.