Mythos (23 page)

“Faerie ring,” said Melchior. “I never thought I’d say it, but man am I glad to see that.” He sighed. “Not that I wouldn’t dance a jig for a good old LTP gate. But rational travel’s going to have to wait until we crack MimirNet.”

I grinned. Melchior hated faerie rings and chaos magic in general, though he’d gotten much more used to it in the time since I had become the Raven.

I knelt and offered my hand to Laginn. “Thank you; you’re a lifesaver.” We shook—rather surreal, that—and then I set Laginn on my left shoulder before lifting Melchior to my right. “Shall we get out of here?”

Tisiphone took my hand in her own and we stepped into the ring and . . . went nowhere. I could feel the magic of the ring; there was no question it was a faerie ring. It just wasn’t connected to any others. My first thought was that this was a variation of the problem I’d had when I opened the first ring from Loki’s circle of fire—a simple matter of reaching out for potential rings and opening one. But no, I couldn’t touch anything. The ring was static, a thing of chaos magic, but frozen somehow, blocked.

“Weird,” said Tisiphone, after several seconds of nothing happening. “The ring’s live, but it feels like there’s no connection to the network.”

I glanced at Laginn on my shoulder. “Did you come in this way?”

He bobbed a yes, and I let out a little mental sigh. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?

“Now what?” asked Melchior.

Good question
. I stepped out of the ring with Tisiphone. It might not be working at the moment, but standing around in a faerie ring is never a good idea, not unless you want to run the risk of becoming one of the more gruesome sorts of folktale.

“I’m not seeing a lot of good options,” I said. “We can jump up and down in the ring and sing magic songs and dance magic dances, hoping that’ll reactivate the thing, but I don’t have real high hopes on that front. Something is blocking the ring, and I suspect that something is Odin. If it is, then amping the power up is more likely to draw unwanted attention than it is to get things unblocked.”

“Okay, call that a plan B,” said Melchior.

“C, actually. B is wandering around the sewers hoping we find a way out before the hunters find us.”

“Wow, you’re just full of good cheer and optimism,” said Melchior. “What’s the A plan? We all chop each other’s heads off and hope the Valkyries come and take us off to Valhalla for a glorious afterlife?”

“We hack our way out.” I turned to Tisiphone. “Do you still have that networking card?”

“Huh?” She jerked guiltily and looked up from her hand, where three silver-white strands had been wrapped around and around her middle finger. “Sorry. Yes, of course.”

She produced the card, handing it to me before walking to the edge of the platform and staring over the railing. I knew what it meant to be betrayed by a matriarch you had trusted, and I felt for her. But there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, and with pursuit an unknown distance behind us, time was at a premium.

“What do you think?” I passed the card to Melchior.

“Hmm.” He turned it over and over in his hands. “Weird pin set. I don’t much like the way this circuit board looks either.” He lifted the card to his lips. “Tastes wrong, too.”

“Yeah, but can you access it?”

He pulled the card away from his mouth and shook his head. “Not without serious modifications, either to my card slots, or to the card—possibly both—and there’s no way we’re going to do that without a complete set of tools and test equipment.”

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and tried to think of something really clever. Nothing came. We were screwed.

“Don’t write us an epitaph just yet,” said Melchior. He put the connector in his mouth again, leaving it there for several seconds before shrugging and tilting his head from side to side. “Ain’t no way I’m going to make this work the way it’s supposed to this side of a good electronics lab, but I could maybe fake it . . . kind of . . . if I have to . . . for a relatively narrow value of faking it.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh, Hades,” he said, “let’s just do it.”

“There’s my Melchior.” A relieved grin tugged at my lips as I dug out my athame and a networking cable. “Laptop?”

“Nope,” he replied.

With very few exceptions, Melchior prefers to be in computer shape for jacking-in purposes. I gave him the eyebrow again.

“I’m going to want fingers for this,” he said, “and teeth.”

He whistled a simple spell then, and familiar though it was, it sounded strange rendered into the local pseudobinary. When he finished, his canines and claws had gone from enamel and keratin to copper and gold. He shifted his grip on the networking card, holding it a bit like a harmonica, with several of his claws firmly placed against conductors on its surface. Then he slid it side to side a couple of times, touching his fangs to different pins in quick succession as he did so, making the harmonica comparison even stronger.

“This is really going to suck,” he said.

“Are you sure you want to try it?” I asked as I plugged one end of the networking cable in to my athame. “It’s not too late to back out.”

“Just do it.”

I sat down on the floor beside him and slid the connecter into his right nostril, pushing firmly until it clicked into place. He made an “I get no respect” face, but didn’t say anything.

With a sigh, I placed the athame against the palm of my hand. It was only just recovering from my last jaunt in cyberspace. I glanced at Tisiphone, but she still had her back to the rest of us, and her body language said “leave me alone” in ten-foot letters of fire. Laginn, meanwhile, was doing antsy little push-ups that said “hurry, hurry, hurry,” just as clearly. I laid myself the rest of the way down, wincing a bit as my hair came into contact with the accumulated slime of ages.

“Back in a bit,” I said quietly.

Then I shoved the blade home and had other worries. Melchior’s inner cyberspace looked as if it had been burgled. Rather than the usual pebbled-leather walls, elegant furnishings, and brass spiral stair, I found myself in a big blue box with one wall open to the outside. It reminded me of nothing so much as a shipping container.

Melchior hadn’t bothered to dress his projected self up either, appearing simply as a miniature goblin, not much bigger than my thumb. He stood beside the open wall, looking out, and I joined him there. Beyond hung the great, glow-in-the-dark spiderweb that was MimirNet.

“I’m noticing a distinct lack of insideness to our position,” I said after several seconds. “In fact, I’d have to say that we’re still very much outside the net.”

“You don’t say,” replied Melchior, his voice sour.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what the plan called for.”

“The damn system has some sort of built-in encryption on top of the hardware lock,” said Melchior. “I’m working on it, but it’s really nasty. Which is, by the way, taking up a lot of processor cycles, resulting in the esthetically challenged environment you now find yourself inhabiting.”

“Well, see what you can do, Mel. In the meantime, bring us in a bit closer. If I’m not imagining things, the network looks a bit less thoroughly armored this time around.”

“It is,” agreed Mel, as we slid in close. “That’s because of the card. . . . I think. I just don’t know. Everything is so different here.” He kicked the wall. “I want to go back home where things make sense, and the chaos won’t kill you.”

I felt more than a little bit of sympathy for that. There were things about our current environment that I really liked, most notably the distinct absence of Atropos and Hades. Not having to look over my shoulder constantly for my direst enemies had a lot to recommend it. If the local pantheon was also content to leave me and mine the hell out of their disputes, I’d probably be looking for a new house. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Compound that with the fact that I didn’t really understand what was going on or who the players were, and the almost-but-not-quite-the-same nature of the local versions of binary and chaos, and the idea of going home held an ever-increasing appeal.

Of course, the first step on the road home involved escaping our current situation. I looked out at MimirNet again and sighed. Despite the lack of visible armor, I wasn’t feeling much more optimistic about breaking into the system this go-round than I had the last time—not with Melchior having to play the card like a damned harmonica rather than simply plugging it in.

“Screw it.” I jumped down to the surface of the nearest tube, landing with a hollow “thump.”

“Are you crazy?” yelled Melchior, dropping the big blue box to within a few inches of the surface. “Get back in here!”

I ignored his demands in favor of a close examination of the tube. It differed radically from the heavy armor I’d encountered in my last visit. That had been terribly slick and slippery with just the tiniest bit of give, like a strip of intestine from some giant dragon of myth.

Minus the armor, the system reminded me rather a lot of a series of enormous hamster tubes, hard and shiny but semitransparent. I could see the data flows going past beneath me, and I could probably have learned a great deal about the system just by standing there and watching if I’d had the time. I didn’t.

I asked Melchior for the software equivalents of a safe-cracker’s kit and went to work. He swore quite a bit and called me nine kinds of idiot for risking myself that way, but he also handed over the code tools as fast as he could produce them. We both knew it would be much quicker that way, assuming, of course, that I could get in at all. But after twenty minutes I hadn’t even managed to scar the finish.

That was not a huge surprise but it still hit me pretty solidly in the ego. I’m a damn good cracker, present circumstances to the contrary, and I don’t like failing. Not even when I expect to. But there it was. I simply didn’t have the right tool set to solve this problem, though I was, by all the gods, going to find or build it as soon as I got the chance.

The next question became, what
could
I do, given the constraints of the situation? If I had an infinite power source, I could use the outer surface of the network as a scaffolding for my own parasitic system—a sort of epiphyte shadow network—and ignore what happened inside. But Melchior simply didn’t have that kind of capacity. Not in terms of power. Not in terms of processing. And, especially, not in terms of range.

I stomped my foot in frustration, producing a hollow “thud,” which caused the nearest packets to skitter away from the point of impact and sent a ripple through the data flows. There was an idea. Could I pound the thing like a drum and send messages via the ripples? I stomp danced a quick SOS in pseudobinary and watched it propagate off into the distance. So, the theory was sound. Of course, the message could reach only those already plugged in to the system, and our only outside friend, Ahllan, most definitely was not.

I was still trying to figure out some way to make that work for me when I felt a solid thump through the sole of my boot. I glanced down into the net and found myself face-to-face with a grinning Loki. He formed his hand into a gun and pointed it at me, dropping his thumb in the classic “bang, you’re dead” gesture of childhood.

“Time to go!” yelped Melchior, and I felt a tugging at the back of my collar as he tried to drag me into the big blue box.

I resisted, kneeling instead to meet Loki’s eyes through the wall of the data channel. He grinned.

“What do you want?” I asked. I kept my voice conversational, sure he’d hear me if he wanted.

“What have you got?” he replied. “You’re the one who sent the SOS, aren’t you? You’re the one that wants help. What’s it worth to you?”

“It was more of a test message,” I said.

“Freudian slip much? I have my sources in Asgard. Don’t try to tell me you don’t actually need help.”

“Why would we trust you to give it?” I shook my head. “You’re the guy who kidnapped Melchior and nearly killed Ahllan.”

He shrugged. “This affects your current problems and needs how?”

I stood and walked away from the place where Loki hovered in the data stream and smirked. That we couldn’t trust him was a given. That we needed help was, unfortunately, also a given. That didn’t mean we could take his, but it did mean I couldn’t dismiss him out of hand.

The first big issue was motive. What did I have that he wanted badly enough to bring him here? Because there was no way he had come all this way out of the simple goodness of his heart. Even if everything Odin and Thor had said about Loki was a lie, he was still a god. Gods don’t do favors for free, no matter what their worshippers claim. If I’d learned anything from my relations with my extended family, it was always to look for the divine catch.

The second issue was price. Could we
afford
to take him up on his offer? Could we afford not to?