WebMage (13 page)

We cheat and steal from each other, break each other's codes, and trash each other's files, even kill one another. But that's all politics and therefore acceptable, simply part of what it means to belong to the extended family of the Titans.
How
we do things, on the other hand, belongs in the realm of etiquette, which is inviolable. We'll only do unto each other while wearing our real faces and our formal best. To do less would be to diminish ourselves. I'm not certain why court protocol and garb had advanced up to the Renaissance and no farther, but I suspected it was because my clan matriarchs had rather liked Queen Elizabeth's style.

I whistled the code sequence that released the illusion covering my features. There was no physical sensation as the tops of my ears elongated and sharpened to points once again, and my pupils resumed their natural catlike slit. A full-fledged child of Fate once more, I was ready to enter the demesne of Atropos.

I turned back to Melchior. He stood beside the completed hexagram, working his jaw like a shortstop with a mouthful of chaw. After a moment, he spat a netspider into the center of the drawing. It paused long enough to set a softly glowing anchor line, then vanished with a slight pop of inrushing air, like a bubble bursting. It was back an instant later, and Melchior scooped it up and popped it into his mouth. He made a face at the bitter taste.

"Ltp link established," said the webgoblin, "connecting to Mtp://mweb. ([email protected]) Atropos.web / server / core." A series of sharp hisses and buzzes passed his lips before he continued, "Connect. Initiating Gate procedure."

The glowing end of the anchor changed from gold to green. Melchior bent on one knee and pulled on this small green nodule. The green light expanded to fill the whole diagram, then started to climb, like liquid poured into a hexagonal glass. When the column of light was about six feet high, it shifted from green to blue. The way was open.

"Shall we?" I asked, gesturing toward the shimmering light of the gateway..

"No thanks, Boss. The fire's getting low. You go ahead without me, and I'll make sure everything is nice and toasty on this end for your return."

"I don't think so, Mel."

Placing the toe of my boot firmly under his small blue butt, I gently shoved him into the light. Before he could do more than squawk, I joined him.

"Melchior, Locus Transfer. Execute."

He sighed, then hissed out the appropriate commands. Around us the walls of the cabin were replaced by the energyscape of the-place-between-worlds. For a few brief seconds, we were nothing more than packets of data streaming through a sea of primal chaos, with only the thin walls of an mweb channel to prevent our being rendered down to component parts. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, like surfing a wave that's just a hair too large.

Almost before it started, it was over. We arrived at one end of a large stone room full of towering banks of organic crystal. No two structures looked alike. They were fractal shapes created for specific purposes by very unspecific means. Any chaotic system can serve as a computer when you enter the parameters of your question into the initial conditions. If you know how to set everything up, the final shape of the system will reflect any possible answers. That was how Atropos constructed her network, growing each processor to suit the needs of the moment. . A few of these twisted shapes crawled with light and life, humming quietly to themselves and dreaming electronic dreams. Most were dark and silent, the red and green jewel tones of their LEDs dull and dead. The atmosphere was laced with the burned-plastic smell of cooked transformers, an old room full of antiquated and mostly forgotten equipment. I headed for the very back. In a dark corner, out of sight of the door, I found a machine with a few blinking lights to indicate it was still operational.

"Here we go, Mel. Why don't you prep Revenant and Charon while I take a look at the Fate Core?"

"If Atropos catches us, she's going to have us for lunch."

"The only way she'll ever see Revenant is if we're already dead."

"Oh,
that's
reassuring," he replied, as his face took on the abstracted expression that means he's moving things from archive to active storage.

Flipping down the keyboard, I started typing commands. After a few minutes of careful work, I managed to pull up a system hierarchy schematic. I let out a low whistle. We'd struck the bull's-eye. When Atropos upgraded to copper she'd centralized all the old ley-line connections and their command architecture into one mainframe bank. My code weasel, tracking a ley link back into Atropos. web, had taken us straight to those mainframes. There was nowhere else for it to go. But the link I'd followed wasn't the only one governed from that room. My schematic clearly showed a lone strand of gold light running straight from my current machine to the Fate Core. I'd never dreamed Atropos would leave something like that in place.

"Hey, Mel. Are you done with your upload?"

"Yes. Have you found us a launch site?"

"Take a look at this!"

He climbed onto the console and peered at the screen. "That's beautiful. Do you think the security is as out-of-date as the hardware?"

"There's only one way to find out. Melchior, Charon. Execute."

He licked his right index finger and inserted it into the keyboard's universal port. Then he whistled a quick sequence of code, paused, whistled another one, and unplugged. Charon was the program I'd written to ferry Revenant to its new home in the Fate Core.

On the schematic, Charon showed as a tiny skull icon. It slid from my borrowed machine into the Fate Core line with only the briefest pause. From there it slipped down the ley line to the Fate gateway. The pause as it crossed from line to system was longer, but nothing like long enough. I felt an icy worm crawling up and down my spine. Something was very wrong.

"Uh, Boss?"

"Yes."

"I watched you put Charon together. It's as slick a piece of code as you could ask for, but there's no way it's that good. I think we should leave now."

"You know, Mel, I'd be inclined to agree with you, except for one thing."

"What's that?"

"Charon's already in the Fate Core. If Atropos is onto us, we're dead. Nothing we do will change that. On the other hand, if whatever's wrong isn't Atropos, we can't pass this opportunity up. We aren't ever going to have another chance this good."

Melchior nodded reluctantly, and I could feel sweat beading at my temples as I tried to decide what to do next. My original plan called for getting in, releasing Revenant, and getting the hell out. I hadn't precoded any real tools beyond Charon, and with the stakes so high I hated to wing it.

"Mel, I want to run a mole down there. Can do?" I didn't issue a command. I'd designed Melchior as a high-level hacking tool, and I wanted his opinion now, not his obedience.

"Hmm, standard hex code link…" He mumbled to himself for a little while before answering. "Yeah, Boss. No problem."

He moistened his finger and slid it into the port again. The whistled sequence was shorter this time and cruder.

"It's away," he said. "Once it gets a lock it'll start streaming back to here. The imaging system on this antique is a little crude, but it'll do."

After a brief interval, several windows opened on my screen. In the first, binary data scrolled by. On the second, a map of the mole's progress and relative position appeared. The third held a graphic representation of the mole's-eye view.

This latter showed the inside of the golden ley link. It looked something like a subway tunnel burrowed through raw ore. That wasn't right. It should have been older and smoother, polished by eons of data flow. At its end lay a huge obsidian gateway with an ID tag reading: "Fate Core. Enter here and ye shall be as never born, thy thread unraveled, thy destiny undone." The gate was closed, its panels seemingly impenetrable. The mole advanced slowly. It nosed at the gate, pushed gently… fell through. There was no resistance.

The mole turned and examined the gate. From my side it looked like torn cobwebs. I'd come to hack the Fate Core, but someone had beaten me to it. The ice worm in my spine dropped a litter and hundreds of cold little offspring crawled through my flesh. Something very bad was happening, and I might be the only person in the three houses of Fate who knew about it. More than anything, I wanted to run home and tell Lachesis, but that wasn't an option. Besides my problems with credibility and the Cassandra curse, the penalty for being here was death, and right at the moment I didn't think my grandmother would even hesitate at the thought. I'd need a lot more in the way of informational bargaining chips if I wanted to get that sentence commuted.

I turned the mole around and looked through its eyes. In this representation, the Fate Core was an endless sea filled with the writhing snakes of the life threads, tumbling strands of all lengths and colors. I sent the mole plunging in among them. It hadn't gone far when it encountered something huge. A wall of interlocking links of pale blue fire that slid past in a seemingly endless progression. Mel's jaw fell open.

"What the hell is that?" he whispered.

"I don't know, but look at that armor."

I turned my attention to the map view. The mole was nosing along one side of what appeared to be a giant batch job, looking for a line of loose code. Finally, it found one. In the graphic view, a bent link offered a slight gap into which the mole slid its snout. For just a second, something dark and serpentine appeared on the monitor. Then the mole stopped seeing the program. The binary window clicked shut. The map no longer read anything other than the mole. The graphic view showed the sort of calm data-scape you'd expect on a normally engaged system.

"Shit!" I said.

"Oh yeah!" agreed Mel. "Whatever that thing is, it just unraveled the mole, subverted it, and put it back in place without even interrupting the data stream."

"I think we've found our invader." I felt my shoulders hunching as though they expected someone to put a knife between them.

"Well, it sure doesn't belong to Atropos," said Melchior, shaking his head gently. "She's not that subtle. Besides, she wouldn't need to convert probes within the system. She'd just fry them and call out the troops."

"I wonder whose it is?" I asked. "The Fates can't know about it. They wouldn't willingly let anything that big and nasty wander around if it wasn't theirs."

"Well," asked Melchior, "is that all bad? Someone else dislikes Atropos, too. Why don't we leave it to its business and get on with ours? We've been here too long as it is."

"You've got a point, but…"

"But what?" He jerked his chin up challengingly. "I can't see how anyone causing trouble for Atropos poses us a problem. Hell, we should be thanking them. Whoever it is might even draw her fire away from us for a while. Wouldn't that be nice?"

I was tempted. But the Fate Core is the place where the destiny of every living thing is laid out. From inside you can rewrite that destiny. There are other ways to do it—there's no such thing as pure predestination—but none of them are easy, and none of them are on the same scale. For all I knew, that thing could be as bad as Puppeteer, or worse. I couldn't just leave something that dangerous in there.

"No, Mel." I stepped away from the screen and stretched. "That's a really vicious piece of code. It gives me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. The Fate Core is the joint property of all three houses of Fate. It's not just Atropos's problem. It's mine, too. I'd like a better idea of what that is and what it's doing before I head for the hills. Let's knock together another mole. This time I want to get an overview of the boojum."

"That's just going to be a waste of time. We—"

"Melchior!" I snapped. "Just do it." He nodded his assent.

This time the graphic view showed a larger view, in which the twisting shape of the boojum was slowly moving through the data sea. It looked like a particularly nasty cross between a dragon and a snake. Its front end was somewhere below the surface, but its tail and the claws of its short hind legs were clearly visible trailing through the ocean of information. So was the line of its wake. I couldn't help myself, I physically flinched. I wasn't alone. Melchior was in such a hurry to get away from the grim sight that he actually fell off the console. Where the thing had passed, it left hollow, colorless life threads arranged in straight lines. I didn't know enough about how the Fate Core worked to know what that meant, but it looked terrible.

"Boss," whispered Melchior, standing on tiptoes to peer at the screen, "let's get the hell out of here. I don't know what that thing is, or what it's doing, but if Atropos finds us with our little electronic fingers within a thousand miles of it, we can kiss our asses good-bye."

"Too fucking right. Melchior, Exit Strategy. Exe…" The words died on my lips.

On screen, the boojum had raised its head. It looked like the world's biggest cobra. But where a cobra wore a symbol like two eyes connected by a U on its hood, this one had a glowing golden apple. It was the signature of Eris, Goddess of Discord, sworn enemy of Fate, and a distant cousin via Cronus's line. The golden apple had been her calling card ever since she'd used one to start the Trojan War.

All of that was washed from my mind when the thing struck, smashing its head into a dense cluster of life threads and swallowing thousands. Others swarmed away from it, but none made it past the crushing coils of Discord.

No surprises there. From everything I'd ever heard, Eris was one hell of a coder and without peer in the virus department. A hacking goddess. Where I coded spying moles and slinking weasels, she wrote virus dragons. One of which was eating its way through the Fate Core even as I watched.

I had a major dilemma. I couldn't let Eris have her way with the Fate Core, as much as I admired her hacker moxie for trying. I loathed Atropos and what she wanted to do with Puppeteer, but she wouldn't be the only victim. My grandmother Lachesis and my great-aunt Clotho were also in the Fate business. I didn't always agree with them, but they certainly handled things better than Discord would. She'd take things as far in the direction of pure chaos as Atropos wanted to take them toward absolute order. The issue was how to stop her.