WebMage (12 page)

After about an hour a wide gap between the trees opened up to my left where another path turned off. It hadn't been groomed, and the long line of pristine snow stretching between the pines was starkly pretty. I slid off the main trail and slipped my backpack off. Melchior, in laptop form, was tucked into the top. I flipped his lid and typed in a spell prompt.

Run Melchior. Execute.

But, it's cold out there, Ravirn.

I didn't ask for editorials.

Oh, all right, but I'm not going to like this.

In a matter of moments he was standing and shivering atop my pack. "What do you want?"

"A GPS fix. I want to know if this is our turn."

"For that, you had to turn me back into a goblin? A simple typed request would have worked fine, and this weather is much nicer if you don't have any nerve endings to freeze."

"Deal with it, Mel. If this is the place, I'll want you to hide my tracks."

"Oh, great," he said. "What could possibly be more fun than slogging through neck-deep snow while brushing out ski tracks? When do I get to start?"

"You tell me. Where are we?"

His face went abstract for a few seconds as he queried the GPS satellite system. Then he let out a little martyred sigh. He tried to maintain an air of injured dignity as he hopped down, but the snow was deeper than he was tall. With only the faintest of crunches as he went through the icy underlayer, he dropped completely from sight. A moment later, his face fixed in a scowl, he pulled himself out onto the crust. Making his way to the base of a fir, he tore a branchlet free to use as a broom.

"So, tell me again why we have to come way out here to commit suicide," he said, once we'd gotten far enough off the main trail that he could drop the cover-up and climb up into the pack again.

"We're not committing suicide."

"How do you figure?" he asked. "We're messing around with the Fate Core. If Atropos catches us, your grandmother will hand her the scissors."

"We won't get caught," I reassured him. "I have it all planned. We'll slide in, insert Revenant into the Core, and slide out. It'll be a surgical strike, thirty minutes from start to finish, tops. Short-term scary, but it'll seriously increase our long-term odds of survival."

I wasn't anywhere near that confident. The Fate Core is at the center of everything my family is. If Atropos hadn't driven me to it, I'd never have even considered messing with it.

"Who do you think you're kidding?" asked Melchior. "Revenant is just a fancy dead-man switch. It might make Atropos's life miserable after you're gone, but it won't do a thing to keep you alive."

I shrugged. He was right. But somebody had to stop Atropos, and I'd been elected. Ruining Puppeteer was more important than staying alive, and if Revenant worked properly, even dying wouldn't take me out of the game. Of course I wouldn't be around to gloat, and that took some of the savor out of things. But Melchior knew all that already.

"If you've got a better idea, Mel, I haven't heard it yet."

"Sorry, Boss. Just nervous I guess." He looked around. "Why on Earth did Atropos put a backbone hookup to Atropos. web. out in the middle of nowhere like this?"

"No choice. Believe it or not, there's a big nexus here."

"That's crazy," said Mel. "Nobody lives here. There's no good reason for people to put in a junction."

"People didn't. We're heading for what used to be a major ley-line node with a direct server connection to Atropos.web. Since her new, fast routers are all fiber-optic only, the ley link isn't used much anymore, but it's still connected as a backup."

"Oh, goody," said the webgoblin. "In addition to squatting in a snowbank and freezing to death, we'll be using antiquated equipment to hack the most sophisticated and heavily guarded hub in existence. You
know
ley-line hookups give me a headache."

"It won't be that bad. This nexus is cross-linked to a fiber bundle and the cell net. That's part of why I picked it. The ley net was never fully integrated with the newer systems, so security's a little more ragged at connection points like this. Better still, the antennas are mounted on a fire tower, and there's a cabin for the rangers, so we'll be able to get out of the weather."

"Somehow, the idea of sitting in a tiny unheated shack doesn't improve my mood much."

Just then we arrived at the base of the tower in question, a tall wooden framework with cell antennas, identifiable by their characteristic rod shapes, mounted to the supporting posts. At the base stood a concrete hut, painted green to blend with the surrounding conifers. A small log cabin was just visible a short way off through the trees.

"Mel, why don't you get a fire going in the cabin while I look at the communications shack?"

"You feeling all right, Boss?
I
get to do the quiet warm indoor job while
you
freeze in the snow?" Before I could respond he headed for the cabin. "Sounds like a lovely idea."

I considered chucking a snowball at him, but thought better of it. Instead I skied over to the hut and checked it out. The lock was a four-pin Schlage, but it yielded quickly to a spell-augmented pick.

Inside it was as cold as the great outdoors and as black as the eyes of Cerberus. A quick flick of the light switch solved the latter problem. The room contained the switch-box and monitoring system for the cell antennas and a trapdoor through which I accessed the fiber-optic conduit and junction. Pulling a small ball of silken cord from my fanny pack, I tied one end of the cord around the conduit and whistled a short binding spell.

The cord's knotted end liquefied and flowed through the surface of the conduit. Assuming I hadn't transposed a couple of ones and zeros, the strands of the knot would attach themselves to the various strands of fiber, giving me a hard line to the node. The quality of the link might have been a little cleaner if I'd done an actual optical connection, but that would have required serious tools. Also, since I wanted to use the ley part of the node as my main hacking channel anyway, it was probably better to use old-style symbolic magic for my entry point.

Once I'd unspooled a couple yards of cord I closed the trapdoor. That was another advantage to using silk—it didn't matter if it kinked. Then I headed for the cabin, playing out the line as I went.

The fire Melchior had started was beginning to cut the chill in the single open room. About fifteen feet on a side, it had two sets of bunk beds, a primitive kitchen, and a small fireplace. In the middle of the room was a small table. I removed my mask and gloves and tossed them onto it.

"Mel, climb up here, would you?"

"No thanks," he said from his perch on the hearth. "I like it by the fire."

"It wasn't a suggestion. I want to get the ley link established."

"If you insist, oh my lord and master." He rose from his seat on the rough stones and joined me.

I reeled out another fifteen feet of silk and cut it off. Then I stuck the loose end into a fiber-optic connector and crushed it shut with my Leatherman.

"Hey, Mel, why don't you shift to laptop?"

"Because you're planning on sticking an icy-cold connector into one of my toasty little ports, and I hate that!"

"Not half as much as you'll hate where I put it if you don't shift." He stuck his barbed tongue out from between sharply pointed teeth and waggled it from side to side.

"Melchior, Laptop. Execute."

He managed to flip me a rude gesture before his flesh started to flow and twist. Then the goblin was gone, slumping into the streamlined rectangle of my laptop, lid firmly closed in a subtle but pointed reminder that he disapproved of the current situation.

When I flipped up the top, the blue goblin logo to the left of the screen opened its eyes and glared. I was pretty sure that wasn't in his original programming. When I plugged the connector in and the little eyes crossed, I knew someone was exceeding his design specs again, and I smiled. The programmer side of my personality hated when things didn't work the way they were supposed to and itched to do some debugging. But as a sorcerer I took real pride in creating a familiar who was obviously so much more than a mere automaton.

Time to play with fire again
, I typed.
Are you ready
?

As ready as possible with that freezing plug jammed into my port.

Don't worry. Tilings should heat up pretty quick once we hit Atropos's wards.

Wonderful!

My first exploratory program snaked its way into the ley net with no resistance. The little code weasel slid easily from silken cord to glass fiber to magical line. It slithered forward until it was just inside the nexus, stopped, and waited for further orders. I let it remain there, autonomous, for over an hour. I was feeling very cautious. Then I sent a quick query and the weasel speed-dumped its core into Mel's secure memory buffer for a virus check.

The picture that appeared on Mel's screen looked something like a spiderweb made of rainbow neon. In the center was a semisymmetrical structure of interconnected lines. From the junctures of this central mass came three major and five minor strands. Each of the larger strands left the nexus, then abruptly changed color. This represented the fact that they didn't follow the local topography, twisting off into alternate phase spaces instead. These were the links that tied the ley junction to the fate servers. The cyan went to Lachesis's network, the yellow to Clotho's, and the magenta to Atropos's. Hers was the brightest of the three, because it traced straight back to a server, while the other two patched into their respective systems farther out.

I carefully examined the strand on which the weasel had centered its attention. At the end of the line to Atropos.web was a tiny object almost exactly the same shade and saturation of magenta. With almost nothing to distinguish it from its surroundings it should have been very easy to miss. But finding holes is what I do best.

Zooming in, I saw a small scorpion-like thing whose stalk-mounted eyes tracked slowly across the whole node in a regular circular motion. Its tail, which lay across the junction of strand and node, tensed and untensed in a barely perceptible rhythm.

Gotcha
! I typed.

Melchior flashed a comment on his screen.
What are you talking about
?

Don't you see it?

What I see is an elegant and deadly little piece of security programming. It's tiny and hard to spot, like a passive sentry, but it's obviously active and, knowing Atropos, deadly fast. I don't want anything to do with it.

All true
. The spell had some of the same baroque beauty her Puppeteer spell possessed, albeit on a much smaller and simpler scale. Atropos was a real artist where it came to coding. If she had any flaw in her style, it was a tendency to let elegance get in the way of function as she had done here.

So,
you don't see it
? I typed.

What?

Look at how it moves its eyes, and the way the tail twitches. They're running in a steady pattern. Atropos had to sacrifice something to put all that nastiness into such a pretty little package. She didn't have room for a random-number generator, so she built in a set alert cycle. That means we can slip by in the gap when it resets to the start of its loop.

When do you suppose that is?

Every time the eyes look top center the tail extends onto the ley line. That's probably the upload cycle, when it dumps its memory back to the server.

So, the gap comes when the tail is at maximum contraction. I think you're right. Hell, if we slip a weasel in, it can attach itself to the back of the scorpion's memory packet and get a free ride all the way to the server.

Exactly.

It took five minutes to patch a command sequence together and send it to the weasel. This time, I wanted to keep an eye on things in real time, so I sent a second weasel to observe. Once that was in place, I sent the execute command to Weasel1.

It waited for the right opportunity, then darted forward. I held my breath when it passed from node to line, but everything went smoothly. On the other side of the guardian, it paused and dropped a relay before grabbing on to the back of the next packet upload. We were in.

All right, Mel
! I typed.
Wait for the all clear, then set the hook
.

Waiting
… There was a delay of perhaps fifteen minutes, and I became antsy.
Connect. The weasel has landed! Establishing bypass link
.

That was it. Our code weasel was inside the server node, and we could set up a direct mweb link bypassing Atropos's security completely.

Run Melchior. Execute
, I typed.

"Next time, could you remember to disconnect the cables
before
I change, Boss?" he said as soon as he was back in webgoblin shape. Then, with a scowl, he pulled the connector from his nose.

I grinned. "Whatever you say, Mel. We've got our keyhole. Let's use it. Melchior, establish a locus transfer protocol link with Weasel1. Execute."

While he pulled tools from his belly pouch and went to work drawing a hexagram on the floor, I prepared for the transition. Opening my pack, I pulled out a pair of high court boots, a green-silk tunic, a black half cape, and my sword belt. I took my synthetic ski boots off and replaced them with the leather ones. My shirt and sweater were quickly swapped as well. The tights, of course, remained.

I grabbed one of my ski poles and flicked a hidden catch. Taking the handle in one hand and the shaft in the other, I pulled gently. Out of the shaft slid the silver-chased, damascene blade of my rapier. This went into the scabbard on my left hip. The long parrying dagger concealed in the other pole went into the one on the right.

That left only one detail: my face. I had no intention of being seen when I got to the other end, but family protocol insisted I do things properly. Besides, there was a chance I was going to die in the attempt, and I wanted to look good for the funeral. It struck me then how odd that might seem to a mortal. Here I was preparing to commit a serious crime against another member of my family, and I was worrying about my appearance. But it would have been unspeakably rude to do things any other way.