Melissa Scott - Trouble and Her Friends

The noise came from her tiny porch, a rough, breathless noise like a snarl. She froze, her eyes racing to the alarm system’s display beside the kitchen window. Nothing but green lights, but all that meant was that an intruder was good enough to bypass the system. The sound came again, more loudly. More like an animal, she thought—a raccoon, maybe? They came into the compound sometimes, looking for food or shelter in the one still-empty condo. The thought was reassuring, and she moved quietly toward the short flight of stairs that led down into the little living room. She did not turn on the lights—now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she would be able to see whatever was out there quite clearly—but she reached for the poker that hung from the woodstove she never used. She lifted it cautiously, not wanting to make a noise and alarm whatever it was, and edged toward the sliding door. Rikki the metalworker had made them all shutters two years ago, when he couldn’t figure out any other way to pay his co-op fees, and for the first time she was grateful for them. Very carefully, she reached for the first vertical slat, and jumped as the sound came yet again. It sounded like a drunk’s snoring—if it was a raccoon, she thought, it wasn’t long for this world. She twisted the slat, and it gave a little, as it was designed to do, giving her a tiny window onto her back porch.

A man was sleeping there, curled into a ball on a battered chaise that he had dragged into the uncertain shelter of the trellis, a quilted jacket drawn tight around his burly body. Even in the half-light he looked dirty, and more than a little ill. She blinked, unable to believe what she was seeing—I thought he was long gone, gone back to Europe, or dead— then reached for the box that controlled the window. She touched the sequence that sprung the locks and lit a single light above the door, then shoved curtain and door aside and stepped out into the rain. The man’s eyes opened slowly, and then he seemed to recognize the lights and rolled painfully into a sitting position.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Butch?” the woman asked, and the man gave her the old familiar goofy grin. He hadn’t shaved in long enough that the mustache was beginning to lose definition in a general waste of stubble.

“Hello, Trouble,” he said.

“Jesus Christ,” Trouble said, and bit off the rest of it. You look terrible, she would have said, and she really didn’t want to know. “Come on inside before you freeze to death. How long have you been here?”

Van Liesvelt shambled to his feet, still hugging the jacket tight to him, and she could see where the rain had left darker patches across his shoulders. He looked sideways, still grinning a little, and she gave a sigh of relief: at least he hadn’t had to sell his implants.

“Oh, an hour or three,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake everyone.”

He had lost most of the accent, Trouble thought, sounded more like a Kiwi or something, which was probably just as well. White Africans hadn’t been popular folks for some decades, and queer white Africans were even worse. She shook the thought away as an irrelevance born of her own fatigue, and stood aside to let him in through the sliding door. “But what are you doing here?” she said again, and a thought struck her. “How the hell did you find me?”

“You told me your name, your realname, one time back in Crystal City. I remembered it, and then I got lucky. You’re on the rolls as the local syscop, you know.”

“It’s not that uncommon a name,” Trouble said—the year she was born, every third child had been named India, after the U.N. Festival—and van Liesvelt nodded.

“That’s why I waited on the porch. I didn’t want to wake you, if it wasn’t you.”

Trouble nodded, appeased. “I’m not in the business anymore, Butch.”

Van Liesvelt nodded back. His jacket was beginning to give off a once-familiar smell, cigarettes and musky aftershave and uncleaned wool in heady combination. “I remember. Whatever happened to Cerise, anyway?” He looked around as though he expected the other woman to materialize out of the shadows, and Trouble grimaced at the memory.

“We haven’t been back in touch,” she said, and made her tone a warning not to pry.

“Oh.” Van Liesvelt would clearly have liked to ask further questions, and Trouble cut in firmly.

“Give me your coat, you’re dripping on the carpet. You want a drink?”

“Thanks,” van Liesvelt said, shrugging himself out of the wet fabric. He was a big man, the kind of blond who went red in the summer, and he carried a little more weight than he had the last time Trouble had seen him—a modest roll of flab hanging over the waistband of his jeans. That, at least, was reassuring; maybe the rest was just fatigue and bad habits and falling asleep in the rain, she thought, and went back up the stairs into the kitchen. Whatever else he was or had been, he had been a good friend on and, less commonly, off the nets; she owed him at least this much attention. She hung the coat over a chair so that it could drip on the tiling, then flicked the heating switch to maximum and poured two thick tumblers of neat vodka. Unless he’d changed his style, van Liesvelt would rather drink that than the wine that was the only other choice. She came back down into the little living room, carrying the bottle as well as the glasses, and was not surprised when van Liesvelt finished his drink in a single gulp. He held out the glass again and she filled it, saying, “What’s it all about, Butch?”

“You’re in trouble,” van Liesvelt said, and seemed to find it funny. Trouble eyed him without amusement, and was meanly pleased when he did a double take, looking hard at his glass. “What the hell’s the flavor?”

“Coriander.”

“Jesus.”

There was a little silence, and van Liesvelt looked away from her, staring at the faded carpet as though there was a message encoded in its dull patterns. Trouble said, “So why am I in trouble?”

Van Liesvelt sighed, put the glass down with the second drink barely tasted. “If I have much more, I will be drunk.” He turned back to face her, grey eyes gone suddenly more serious than she had ever seen them. “You sure you went legit, Trouble? ‘Cause I’ve seen some work on the nets that’s real slick, in your style, and goes under your name. Treasury is getting pissy about it.”

Trouble shook her head. “I’m clean. I’ve been clean for, what, just about three years now.”

“Somebody who calls themself Trouble has been hacking the industrials,” van Liesvelt said. “And they’re on the wire.”

“Ah.” Trouble took a sip of her own vodka, the alcohol stinging her lips. That moved the stranger out of the hordes of crackers who infested the nets and into an elite group, the far smaller number of netwalkers, legitimate and not, who had had a brainworm installed. She and Cerise had been part of that, once… She put that memory aside, looked back at van Liesvelt.

“And, on top of all that,” van Liesvelt said, “they’re bragging about it.”

“I never did that—”

“And that’s got everyone’s attention,” van Liesvelt went on, as though she hadn’t spoken. “It’s not so much what they go away with—as best I can hear, it wasn’t much—as that they made some big-time security look like shit, and the powers-that-be are pushing for Treasury to make an example of someone. Trouble, for preference.”

“Fucking idiots,” Trouble said, and wasn’t sure herself whether she meant the Treasury’s network cops or the boasting cracker who’d stolen her name. It had always been stupid to boast about a completed job, was suicidal now; the smart operators did what they were paid for and kept their mouths shut, and that silence brought them more customers in the long run. The trouble was, half the illegal operators still thought Treasury was a bunch of network-nellie fools who got lost every time they left the corporate systems. She had never made that mistake, and she was startled to realize how angry it made her to have her name linked to that particular behavior.