Allie's War Season Three (54 page)

So to speak.

This was their trial run.

Well, not the
first
trial, really...she and Mavis had done some dry runs hacking signals of some of the smaller stores, those lame, stiff-talking avatars. The ones that didn't know how to scan barcodes of passing humans to run credit checks, for example...or how to access those accounts if the human sucker spoke the wrong key words.

Cheap, low-grade shadows, in other words...nothing like those run by the corporate pigs, the holographic think-beings that had access to pretty much anyone's bank account who happened to walk by in a short-sleeved shirt.

Dante had heard even
that
was starting to change with the new high-grade scanners. The big corps didn't advertise that fact, of course, but they'd figured out some way to get at the barcodes past clothes now. Pretty soon, someone would come up with clothing to fool the scans, but lately the corps seemed surprisingly ahead of the curve. There'd always been some lag between the security narcs and the hacks...but that lag seemed to be getting longer instead of shorter lately. They'd recruited too many of the good hackers into their ranks, dangling different kinds of bones in front of their noses...even if it was just that or jail.

Maybe Mavis was right. Maybe some of those scary, Big Brother Mutha's, as Mavis called them, had even talked the government into handing over the implant codes. Or maybe they were adding their own chips into the package by now...learning how to program better consumers, or at least monitor every aspect of their buying habits.

Dante happened to know for a fact that the whole barcode versus implants thing was a scam anyway. Everyone got implants...everyone. They never took them out when people turned eighteen like they claimed. They let those suckers line up like sheep, thinking they could walk away free, unmapped, private citizens...but all they did was knock them out, make an incision, and then laser that barcode right next to the scar. It was bullshit, all of it.

And hell, why
would
they take it out?

Even at fifteen, Dante knew the score. No one at that high-paying bigwig level gave up power when they didn't have to. Why give up
any
opportunity to control the mob...and that's all they saw when they looked at the drones and peons and no-names and kids below a certain level...just a rabble to be herded, intimidated, manipulated and monitored 24/7.

She knew the penalties were steadily getting worse for hacking, too.

She'd seen the warnings flash periodically as she tried to access some of the protected sites...saying how the fines were enough to bankrupt her whole family, that they could take her parents' houses, their jobs, even their passports. But she was still under eighteen, so she knew it was more likely she was looking at a stint in juvie...or maybe she'd get offered some kind of deal, too, like the others. A bond contract to work for the Pentagon, some big multinational with government contracts...or maybe even SCARB. She'd heard a lot of hackers got shoved into those mind-fuck academies run by the World Court.

She also heard about the ones who took deals they weren't allowed to tell anyone about...the ones whose families supposedly thought they were being "detained" for terrorist activities. But the story always got out anyway. No way to hide that stuff entirely, not with all the black market feeds cluttering the skies. Some of those same black feeds claimed worse things happened than backroom deals with slave hackers sold to the highest bidder.

Some said a lot of hackers just disappeared...especially the adults.

But Dante wouldn't get caught. She was too smart for that. She'd picked her partners too carefully.

Anyway, she was a kid. A
girl
kid...and yeah, maybe not blond, but she knew how to widen her eyes if need be, and tremble that lower-lip. She knew how to play the kid card, for sure, if she did get caught again.

That first time was bad, though.

She'd been picked up for a short run when she was thirteen. They couldn't pin it on her, of course...not for sure. She'd erased everything in her data banks at home, keeping it all on a black box she hid in a locked room in an abandoned warehouse near the river park. Her and Mavis worked out a long time ago to never have anything sitting smack dab in either of their actual
houses,
much less their rooms. So they found themselves an unused squatter's hut, claimed a room for themselves and kept it locked and the machines hidden under the floorboards when they weren't there. A small satellite dish even lived in the remains of the chimney that once led to a laundry in the rusted crap hole where a bunch of poor people sewed clothes or worked some other shit job, way back in historical times.

Mavis' uncle owned a few of those buildings, so whenever some bum screwed with them, he'd just call the police and they'd clear the place out.

Dante thought it was funny as hell, having the police work for them. Keeping 'the office' clean, as she and Mavis jokingly called it.

Those SCARB assholes were a different story.

They weren't as dumb as cops.

Dante got stuck in a room with three of them for like four days. By the end of the first day, she already figured out they
knew
she did it. They couldn't pin it on her, but Dante could tell they knew. She didn't know how they knew, precisely, but she saw the quiet one in the corner with the weird, silver eyes...figured he had to be an iceblood, so he probably got most of the real shit out of her mind. The guy barely blinked for like two days, but she could feel him watching her, like a bug under glass he was thinking about dissecting later...or maybe having for dinner with his iceblood pals.

She still wasn't sure how she got out of that whole thing.

She knew the law, of course...iceblood testimony wasn't admissible in court, even if they got their information the normal, non-seer way. Usually they used their sniffer dogs, as Mavis called the SCARB Sarks with a laugh, to get a location on any physical evidence or possible witnesses. But Mavis moved the machines as soon as he heard Dante got picked up. He'd stashed them somewhere...probably in some sewer tunnel, knowing him...so the SCARB fucks got pissed, started threatening her, asking her about her little brother, about her parents.

Mavis' dad was some kind of bigwig in Black Arrow, that big genetics company. He bragged to Dante later they would never pick up Evan Saunders' kid, even if he murdered someone. He said his dad would have those SCARB narcs in a welfare line by the end of the day if they tried it, if not in the ground.

Dante didn't know if that was true, or just a lot of dick-waving crap, but they never did pick up Mavis, like they did her. Since that iceblood prick must have gotten Mavis' name from her mind the same way he got the location of her black boxes, Dante figured Mavis must be telling the truth...that he was protected somehow. Untouchable.

Given that Dante's mom was a manicurist and a sign painter, she didn't figure she'd be getting that lucky, at least not anytime soon.

She suspected she didn't get out of it so much by having her machines stashed as she did by knowing when to turn on the waterworks. She even pissed her pants deliberately at one point, when they wouldn't let her use the restroom for like four hours. She did it partly to freak them out...try and convince those Nazi fuckers how scared she was. Like, how could she be any kind of threat, this little girl with the quivering lip who pissed her pants?

Mavis laughed his ass off when she told him about that.

But man, it really did work...at least at the time. The guy who'd been grilling her hard, trying to scare her about taking away her mom's job, like, totally freaked out. He nearly fell over in his chair in his attempt to get away from her...and, well, yeah...probably the smell.

Of course, Dante got stuck in wet pants for the rest of that day, but she made the most of that too...sniveling, wiping her nose, shaking like she was cold and humiliated and scared. It was easy to pretend it was some modesty thing, but the truth was, she didn't care that much. The iceblood left the room...
that,
she cared about.

Since they couldn't use Mavis, and she pissed in their interrogation room, and they couldn't find her box, those creeps didn't know what to do with her. She was too young to be tried as a terrorist in the state of New York, so they had to follow the rules of the court system, which obviously pissed them off royally. One of them even turned off the recording devices and threatened to have her deported. No matter that her mother had been born here and Dante had never even been to Madrid, where she was supposedly from...they were going to send her back, let Spain have a budding terrorist on their hands.

Between her acting like some scared, freaked-out, little girl and the lack of physical evidence, they finally had to let her go.

Success, as far as Dante was concerned.

A second offense would be more complicated. They'd know they picked her up before, so they wouldn't be so easy to freak out and have it be convincing. She was also teetering pretty close to that cutoff line for trying terrorists as adults, which was sixteen. They might just stick her in a holding cell and wait for her birthday to roll around.

Still, Dante didn't think she'd get caught. Since that first bust, she and Mavis had gotten a lot more careful. Even her portable monitor was essentially a dummy terminal. Connected to the main boxes, it would erase all connections to the main the very
second
it got hit by a scanning probe...which they'd have to do before they picked her up.

Dante would get at least a three...maybe four minute window between the warning and when they found her on the ground. By then, the machine, and Dante herself, would be long gone. Mavis even hooked the two of them up with fake passports that would seem to go along with their implants. He'd already tampered with her implant some...a federal offense, but one mightily worth risking in Dante's opinion. Mavis seemed to think so, too, but he could be cool in that way, at least when it came to hooking her up with hardware that required serious bread.

She figured it was at least partly some ploy to get into her pants. Mavis looked at her a little too long and hard sometimes, especially lately.

But she didn't care about that, either.

It was insurance. And Mavis might be a dork, but he was a super smart dork. He was a good partner, too, and she didn't want to mess things up with him. She needed him, so he'd just have to find some other girl to give him a blow-job now that he was all hormonal.

Grinning again when Pip laughed, pointing at the VR man who stood in the alley, smiling at them in a friendly way, Dante chuckled, shaking her head.

"You ready to do some crime, girl?" she asked Pip.

"Hell, yeah!"

"Then let's convince mister shiny-insurance-salesman-douche to walk down to Times Square for us...find some fish to hook..." She checked her watch. "Should be a few out biting by now. Enough to test our boy out..."

Pip laughed harder, her pupils still dilated from the pipe they'd smoked before heading uptown to where the primest pickings lived. She picked at a zit on her chin absently, looking slightly wild-eyed, like she always did. Pip was a little crazy, Dante knew. Which made her a hell of a lot of fun to hang with...most days, anyway.

"Come on!" Pip urged. "Let's do this...when we get the cash we can go get some food...then maybe go to Gregor's, get that new samp bag he said he got in yesterday..."

"Food?" Dante rolled her eyes. "We're going for credit accounts, Pip-a-roni. You want to use that for a hotdog? A slice of pie? One of Gregor's bags of shitweed he pretends he stole from some exotic seer lab? Trust me, Mavis stole some real samp off his dad once, and Gregor's never even
seen
that shit before. He wouldn't know it if he sat on it...and if he did, it would blow out his doors and leave him with a DT rectum..." Snorting a laugh, Dante folded her arms and added, "In any case, that's thinking small, Pipster. That's chump change..."

"I just mean
before.
We get food and hit Gregor's before..."

Dante frowned again. "Before what?"

"Before we go shopping..." Pip said, that gleam in her eyes again.

Still grinning that crazy grin of hers, Pip pulled the list out of her skintight jeans, flapping it at Dante's face. They'd made it the night before when the three of them were high in Mavis' basement, trying to decide how best to spend the money while they inhaled fixers and took turns with Mavis' one working illegal wire. At the top of the list was the best feed-box that money could buy, two liquid monitors with built-in morph so they could turn your whole room into some kind of VR wonderland, a freestanding server with enough memory to do some serious damage on their next 'op,' as Mavis liked to call them, probably copying his dad...a sound system for Mavis' new roadster, a mixing board, a guitar with every trick and gloss built in...