Originator (35 page)

Danya searched and produced one. “Front gate,” he advised, as Svetlana stripped the pen for an inner spring coil. “Lock's good, but the paving's loose, you can squeeze under. And if you trigger something, just smash a window and run like hell.”

“Yep,” said Svetlana. “Rendezvous back up the hill if I fuck it up.” And she scampered along the wall, Sandy close behind. Sandy had been about to say something about that entire conversation, Danya knew, but hadn't. Clearly she wasn't happy.

They waited for Svetlana by the wall edge looking onto the rough trail leading to the carport. “She's been practising breaking into our house,” Danya explained, as they peered through the leaves of an obscuring bush.

“Yes, I know,” said Sandy a little drily. So some of the combat reflex had worn off. “She bypasses primary settings but not secondary, I see those on replay.”

“Canas is special security, a place like this won't have anything that advanced.” He glanced back to where Kiril remained hidden in bushes farther back up the hill, with Dodger. He grimaced. Well, that was what happened when you let seven-year-old boys name pets. In Droze, he'd once kept a beetle named Flash. When he trod on Flash by accident, Svetlana had renamed him Splat. It remained a sore point between them to this day. “Sandy, what if Kiril's uplinks are giving away our location?”

“I think Cai would see it,” said Sandy. “If Cai can access the net as much as he says he can without getting himself killed. And if he can cover us from aerial surveillance, which he evidently can or we'd be dead right now, he can cover us from Kiril's uplinks too.”

“Something's not right about Cai,” Danya muttered.

Sandy looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I think he's on our side. I just don't buy his explanation.”

“People have crises of conscience about their own side's goals,” Sandy replied. “I did.”

“He just did it so smooth, you know? I saw guys get antsy all the time in Droze, you know, you want the money but you don't want to do
that
. Kill someone, rob someone, whatever the job is. Droze was one big fucking crisis of conscience. But Cai just . . .” He shrugged, not knowing how to put it.

“Yeah,” Sandy agreed. “I know.”

“I mean he's alien, I get it. Or aliens built him, whatever. But what do we know of Talee politics? I mean, how many different groups of humans are trying to kill each other? Here, in the League, in the Federation? And how weird would it be if the Talee didn't have the same? I mean, the only guy we've ever heard a real explanation from about how Talee work is Cai, right? You think he's told us
everything
? How much more likely would it be that he was with some other group that disagrees with the main group all along?”

Sandy exhaled softly and kissed him absently on the head. “Who you think?”

Danya shrugged. “Who knows the Talee? But Cai's synthetic. And synthtech caused the Talee to self-destruct, twice. That stuff's gotta be
controversial with them like it is with us. I mean, look how we split on it, Federation and League, had a big war and everything. So now we've got the Talee, one moment the most peaceful neighbours ever, then suddenly trying to kill us, only Cai's trying to protect us and killing his own people. You think maybe Cai's faction was running their human-policy all along? And now the other faction has taken over, only Cai's not going quietly?”

“That would imply there's others like him who might help,” Sandy said quietly. “Takewashi said he got a visit from another one like Cai, who warned him not to pursue Kiril's technology.”

Danya nodded. “Only maybe that wasn't a threat? Maybe it was a warning, not ‘I'm going to kill you,' but ‘watch out 'cause these other guys will try and kill you'?”

“Dangerous to assume all Talee-made human synthetics are on the same side,” Sandy cautioned. “The ones trying to kill us now certainly aren't, they're human-looking just like Cai.”

“And Cai said he was offended by them even existing. What if his faction never
would
have made GIs like that, and that's why he was offended? What if Talee are all split on this synthetics thing, like I said? They certainly like to outlaw some kinds of tech, to the point they'll kill anyone who has it. If that's a thing in their society, a
trend
. . . maybe that's their politics. Or part of it. The synths or synth-users against the rest. And maybe it's dangerous too, 'cause Cai might not just be trying to help us, he might be using us to fight his enemies back home.”

Sandy thought hard for a moment. Distant through the trees, rising smoke from the river. No emergency vehicles yet though, that was odd . . . but maybe not that odd, given how the Talee screwed up the whole network.

“That's it,” Sandy said finally, “I'm deputising you to FSA Agent. That's as good an analysis on the spot as I've heard from anyone.”

Danya managed a smile. “Doing that
and
school will be a bitch.”

“You'll manage.”

Svetlana reemerged at their side, quiet as a ghost and lugging a full backpack. “Jesus, Svet,” said Danya, “you steal a whole banquet?”

Svetlana beckoned urgently for them to follow, and they did, along the wall and up the hill to where Kiril and Dodger were. Jane, wherever she was, stayed put.

“Sandy, I saw the weirdest thing,” Svetlana said urgently. “There were people in the house.”

“Did they see you?” asked Sandy.

“No, that's the weird bit. They weren't in bed, they were watching TV. Explosions next door and everything, just watching TV. Only it looked . . .
strange
.” Svetlana's eyes were wide, face pale. “I was going to run, but they just . . . I made a noise on purpose, just to see, and nothing. No response. So I figured the Talee were hacking them, and I just got into the kitchen, took stuff and left, and
nothing
from them. It was so creepy.”

“Wow,” Danya murmured. “Even out here. How much of the city can they cover at once?”

“Lots and lots,” said Kiril quite matter-of-factly, seated on a tree root with one arm around Dodger. “I can see flashes of it on my uplinks. It looks really complex when it gets close, like when the missiles were incoming. I think they could put the entire city into VR if they wanted.”

It was 4:30 in the morning, and Poole drove along streets as deserted as Tanushan streets ever got. He was dripping wet, as they all were, and newly a thief (or Cai was) in the stolen groundcar that was now the safest way to traverse the city. Or so Cai insisted.

“So how can you VR hack an entire city?” Poole asked, letting traffic central steer the car onto the winding outback road, lest some Talee monitor register his precise GI-driving style and get suspicious. Auto-drive wasn't compulsory out here beyond the Tanushan perimeter, but you needed to register as licenced to do it—the usual Tanushan regulatory straitjacket the free-everythingers complained about.

“It's a self-adapting matrix,” said Cai in the passenger seat. “It takes a lot of work to keep it running. I think there's at least fifty infiltrators here.”

“Some running the matrix, some hunting down Kiril and Sandy?” Poole glanced in the rear vision display to see Ragi in the rear seat. His damaged arm was stuffed under an armpit, and advanced GI or not, he didn't look well. “What percentage?”

“Hard to say,” said Cai. “Depends on circumstance.”

“The inherent contradictions within the matrix will cause an implosion in time,” said Ragi, head back on his seat rest, eyes half-closed. “People not directly hacked will notice those that are hacked aren't responding. I assume they've hacked the FSA and CSA . . . both institutions talk to thousands of people every day, they'll notice if they're not replying.”

“But they are replying,” Cai said grimly. “False conversations, false interactions, or hacking the interlocutor's brain to change their mind about interaction in the first place.”

“That gets obscenely complicated,” said Ragi.

“VR
is
obscenely complicated.”

“But this tries to seamlessly mesh together VR and real-world, one controlled and the other random. To track every permutation, every interaction, to infiltrate that many minds to prevent suspicion leading to realisation and a crash . . .”

“Yes,” Cai agreed. “It has a twenty-four hour shelf life. Much longer, and the internal contradictions will cause implosion, as you say.”

“So we need to keep Cassandra and the kids alive for twenty-four hours,” said Poole.

Cai shook his head. “They won't last that long. I'm running interference on the infiltration matrix. I use the same technology so they haven't registered it's me. I'm fooling them the same way they fool everyone else, they're looking on aerial surveillance and seeing nothing, not realising I'm hacking them. But that won't last more than a few hours, if that. We need a distraction.”

“We need more than a distraction,” Poole muttered, noting a street sign, ten kilometres to the perimeter. Out here it was mostly trees, dark with no street lights, just the occasional glow of a small, passing settlement. “We need to take out the whole fucking matrix.”

“That's just the distraction I mean,” Cai agreed. “We need a place with a big, internally secure network. Independent processors. FSA and CSA are out, they're too compromised by now. Some place unsuspected.”

“Sadar Institute of Technology,” said Ragi. “Not the largest intranet, but largely autistic since they do so many classified things there. I'm friends with some researchers there, they'll help.”

“Not in this they won't,” said Cai. “Uplinked minds are too easily controlled. Human minds, straights. I can help, but I'll be most proficient helping GIs. Humans are too difficult. We need as many GIs as we can get, and we need to get them to Sadar Institute of Technology. There I can make us a little bubble of resistance, from where we might be able to mount a counter-attack.”

“And how do we do that?” Ragi asked. “Even if we have numbers, you're the only one with a chance of unravelling the infiltration matrix. And if there's fifty of them, and one of you. . . .”

“I can disrupt it. We can, using the Institute systems, which I can reinforce from their net assaults. They'll have to attack it in person.”

“Which they're sure to do,” Poole observed.

“Which is where our GIs come in,” said Cai. “If we can assemble a strong enough fighting force, we might be able to kill enough of the attackers to get their numbers down to somewhere manageable.”

“So that's your grand high-technology plan?” Ragi wondered, staring at the car ceiling. “Kill enough of the operators that they can't run their matrix?”

“Yes,” said Cai decisively. “And bullets and bombs remain the most effective ways to deal with high-des combat GIs as well. Or a well-timed punch in the head, as Cassandra just proved. The most effective solution to high-tech offence is low-tech defence, always will be.”

Sandy crouched in cold water at the inner bend of a shallow stream. Undergrowth overhung, drooping green fronds into the flow. From above came the keening of a flyer's engines. Perhaps half a kilometre away and passing. They'd be back soon, sweeping on a search pattern. Behind her, Danya and Svetlana were sharing food with Kiril. Svetlana was shivering, skinny and worst affected by the cold.

About the stream bend Jane appeared, keeping her rifle above the water. “They'll figure we're in the water,” she murmured. “They'll put boots on the ground to flush us.”

“Good,” said Sandy. “I want a better gun. Better yet, I'd like that flyer.” They kept voices low, in case someone already was on the ground. It was an hour after dawn, and already their pursuers seemed to have figured out their aerial surveillance wasn't trustworthy.

“They won't fly that low,” said Jane. “But you're right, we have to hit them. We're better than them in a fight, individually. Especially away from the city.”

“Sandy,” Danya said urgently, repressing his shaking jaw in the cold water. “You should go, both of you. If you stay and try to protect us, you'll get tied down. And by attacking and killing them, you not only do what you're best at—you take their attention away from us.”

Sandy stared at him for a moment. Then out of their little overhang hiding spot, across the stream. “Kid's got a point,” said Jane.

“Where's Dodger?” Kiril wondered. Looking at him up to his chin in river water, eating and shivering, was nearly more than Sandy's combat reflex could take. She steeled herself and forced down her thumping heart. Her kids
hunted by anything but GIs, she could handle. But against the likes of these, she knew the odds. And it took a full-on effort to stay locked so hard into combat reflex that she didn't break down completely.

“I think he's scouting,” Svetlana volunteered. “Lots of animals in the jungle, the Talee will think he's just another one. He won't give us away.”

“Asura aren't native to Callay,” Danya corrected. “If they bothered to check, he might.”

He offered Jane some cold meat from Svetlana's food stash. “Kid's uplinks aren't transmitting,” Jane observed around the mouthful, peering upstream. “If they were, we'd be dead. He's receiving, but he's passive.”

Sandy looked at her. Jane returned a sombre gaze. “Kiri,” Sandy murmured. “Over here.”

Kiril waded past Danya, and Sandy helped him onto a low rock. The water up to his waist, he looked up at her, wet and scruffy and trusting. Again the desperate fight to keep combat reflex in place.

“Kiri, can you see anything else on your uplinks?”

Kiril shook his head. “No, I think we're out of range of any networks here. But when they scan it's like . . . I don't know. I just feel it, more than see it. It's like a dream.”