Charles Stross - Halting State

Venkmann leans forward. “Either of you got a familiar?”

“Um.” You should have thought of that: Just because you disarmed the trap doesn’t mean that it’s safe to look. “I’m fresh out of ’em. How about you?”

“I’ve got a snake,” Stheno offers uncertainly.

“Badger,” says Venkmann. He turns round and begins to incant. There’s a bang and a cloud of purple smoke as a confused-looking badger appears.

“What…” Stheno begins to ask.

“It’s a familiar. He can see through its eyes, okay?” Venkmann continues to incant. A moment later, the badger shimmers and warps into invisibility. “Now it’s an invisible badger—the best kind of camera.” Venkmann bends down, picks something up, and leans over the Iron Maiden before releasing it.

“Well, there’s a surprise!”

“What’s down there?”

“It’s a rabbit-hole,” he says slowly, looking around as if at a different landscape.

“Where’s it go?”

“Looks like Zhongguo shard, going by the map. Which is part of Hentai Animatics’ zone, and we don’t have an admin contract for that. I think you’ve just uncovered an illegal-immigrant tunnel.”

Hackman’s weird outburst has haunted you all through the case team meeting up at the station, despite your hasty cramming on blacknets and anonymizing peer-to-peer crime networks and the people who set them up and skim off the profits; in particular his admonition not to have anything to do with the “bottom-feeding scum.” Bottom-feeding scum are, you might say, something of a professional specialty—and not just when you’re hauling bodies out of the Water of Leith; all you need is to think back to the last open evening at the wee one’s school, and it’s there fair and square in the playground with a squint and a buzz cut to go with the sharpie in its back pocket. It disnae matter whether they’re bottom-feeding scum with a chib and a crack habit or the up-market kind who book the assassinations of their business rivals via blacknet. So, with the inspector’s encouragement, you head back to Hayek Associates’ bunker—where by now they’re hunkering down under their concrete eaves to avoid the barrage of writs and journalists’ inquiries whistling down on them from parts north, east, west, and south—to go Liaise with some Victims.

It’s early afternoon when you park next to the muddy pot-hole at the edge of the car-park. First off, you check the Mess Hall to grab a coffee and see who’s there. A couple of the quants are hanging around the coffee machine: Your glasses—now configured for off-line browsing—remind you of their names, Couper, Sam (“traceroute is my bitch”) and Evans, Darren. You walk up behind them. “Sam, Darren,” you say, with a smile, “how are you doing today?”

They both nearly jump a mile: They may be thick as thieves, but they lack the reflexes of the pathologically non-law-abiding. Turning these nice middle-class nerds inside out and shaking them until the pips squeak would be so easy it’d make the baby Jesus cry: They’re still terrified of parking tickets. Clearly neither of these two are running an illicit blacknet. They haven’t even been exposed to the long arm of the law often enough for it to lose its dreadful majesty. “Fine! Fine! What you want?” Darren asks, too eager for his own good.

“A regular coffee, hold the sugar,” you suggest, and damn if Sam doesn’t turn and make a pathetic lunge for the control panel, so eager to oblige that if you slid an unsigned confession under his fingers, he’d be in for the high jump tomorrow. Aye, this one would have been blackboard monitor in junior six, right enough. Not to mention the class swot. Which may actually make the job at hand harder—they’ll drown you in irrelevant details if you give them the chance. “I was wanting to interview both of you later today, get your account of what happened. Are you free later on?”

“Uh, yeah, just not right now.” Darren is recovering his composure faster than Sam. “Busy fighting fires, covering for that asshole Nigel. He hasn’t updated the group-reconciliation files since last Wednesday, and we’re going to be in the shitter if we don’t get it under control before the weekly M4 policy session.”

“Your coffee, miss…?” says Sam.

“Sergeant, actually.” You smile at him as you take the cup. “Sergeant Smith.” That’s right, grind it in, define your authority now so he bends the neck later. “When’s the policy session?”

“Uh, Wednesday, actually,” volunteers Darren, getting his act together. “I guess I can make some time late this afternoon or maybe tomorrow morning, but right now we’ve got to patch Nigel’s—”

The door opens, and another quant comes in, along with two suits whom your specs unhelpfully identify as VISITOR 1 and VISITOR 2. “That’s okay,” you say. “Tomorrow will do. Ten o’clock?” He nods. “Okay, see you then.” You nod at Sam, also, and he seems to take it as a dismissal and scuttles away with his tail between his legs. Which leaves you with an opportunity to check out the visitors before you move on. You put your smiling meet-the-people face in place and turn to face them.

“Hello,” you say. VISITOR 1 is male, late twenties, overweight, badly shaved, and that suit really doesn’t go with the faded black tee-shirt. VISITOR 2 is female, skinny, somewhere in that vague period between late teens and midthirties, and looks like she knows far too much about spreadsheets for her own good. Black suit, very corporate, well-coordinated. Verdict: They’re technical/clerical citizens. Subtype: probably law-abiding, apart from the occasional furtive joint. “I haven’t seen you around here before. Are you from”—you nudge up the case database—“Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

VISITOR 1 is of a kind with Sam, but VISITOR 2 is made of sterner stuff: She sniffs and gives you an old-fashioned look. “Could be,” she says. “Who are you?”

You stare back at her: She’s a bit mousy, but you’ve met her type before—usually giving you a nasty grilling on the witness stand.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Smith,” you tell her, “working out of Meadowplace station.” You drop the smile. “You are from Dietrich-Brunner?”

VISITOR 2 continues to make with the long stare, but VISITOR 1 caves. “Um, yeah, we are. She’s the organ grinder, I’m just the performing monkey.” He mimes shaking a hat.

VISITOR 2 elbows him in the ribs, sharply. “No, you’re a dancing bear . Do try to get the right species!” She faces you: “I’m sorry we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m Elaine Barnaby, and yes, I’m from Dietrich-Brunner—I’m a forensic accountant. Jack here is a game-development consultant, and he’s acting as my guide. Now, what can we do for you, Sergeant?”

“You can help yourselves to a coffee, then maybe tell me why Marcus Hackman might not want people such as yourselves, um, crawling around on his turf?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Ah, that is an interesting turn of phrase. His? ”

Good, that’s got her attention. “Depends. What are you doing here? I mean, in Hayek Associates’ offices?”

“Oh, that.” She sniffs. Jack bends over the coffee machine, mumbling to himself, then starts punching buttons like it’s a Game Boy. Your fingers are itching to stick their names into CopSpace and see what comes back, but that might be a wee bit too obvious if you did it right now…“I’m supposed to be conducting a security audit on a bank in an online game. At least, that’s what I thought the picture was yesterday. In practice…I take it you’re here because Wayne or Marcus or someone reported the intrusion last week? That’ll have gone on your case-load as a crime, possibly hacking, possibly theft or fraud—whatever. Well, DBA got sucked in because one of our senior partners vetted Hayek’s board before their IPO the other month, and this stinks of an inside job. So Chris panicked and dragged a team of us up here to do something about it. Now there’s a programmer missing and that’s…well, it’s enough to get him off the hook, so he’s pissing off back to the City, but my job—and Jack’s—is to confirm that it really was this Nigel MacDonald that did it, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I think Chris may even be planning to pull strings and get NFIU to take us on as specialist subcontractors, if he can sort out the cross-border jurisdictional voodoo.”