Spellcrash (32 page)

Without so much as spilling a drop of my blood or breaking a sweat, I was able to open up the command line at Fate and look at anything I wanted to. Say, for example, their contingency planning for the transition away from a Necessity-controlled multiverse into a Fate-controlled duoverse.

“That’s so whacked, it’s . . . Auughh!” Melchior was practically shaking by the time we finished reading through that little white paper.

Not that I could blame him. They wanted to collapse all the infinite threads of probability back down into just two, the Olympus-Hades world of the mythological and a single, easily controlled world of humans, which would allow them to junk all of their computers and return to the great loom of Fate as a control mechanism.

At best, it could be read as a desperate parent’s attempts to return an errant teenager to manageable infancy at the cost of the child’s memories to that point. Horrific and a crime, but one that fell within the realm of the unjustifiable-but-marginally-understandable. At worst . . .

something beyond genocide, as the entire populations of millions of worlds were made to have never been. If it wasn’t for the collateral damage it would cause the AI community, I’d have let Persephone’s virus eat the whole works then and there.

As it was, with so many of Melchior’s friends bound into the processing system, we ended up separating the operational portion of Persephone’s Fate Breaker from the access functions. Then we scratch-coded a bunch of sequentially self-loading microviruses of the sort that would keep the system off-line for a few hours at a time without doing any lasting harm. A really spiffy side effect of that was that it would it make it very hard for them to do anything with Melchior’s thread this side of a full system recovery.

How does that look?
I typed on Mel’s keyboard when we’d gotten everything in place.

Fine,
he replied, but the expression of his projected face on the screen didn’t match his words, and I thought I knew why—I felt the same way.

It’s not enough, is it?

The projected face shook its head.
No. I really really hate to say it, because if we go too far in
the other direction, we’re going to hurt people I know and care about, but this one is for all the
money, and if Nemesis escapes . . .

We’ve already sunk more time into this than we can really afford, but I’m willing to keep going if
you are.
I was exhausted already, and we had two systems left to go.

Again his image shook its head, and this time his expression looked sick.
We can’t afford to
leave any of this to chance. I think we should set up E-bola to self-load if they get the system
back online anytime before about a hundred hours after the initial attack.

That’s an ugly solution, Mel. It’s going to hurt webtrolls and webgoblins we know and care
about, maybe even kill some of them.

Melchior’s image nodded but didn’t add a word. He was right, too. We had to have a fallback plan in place even if it killed people.

Every serious hacker/cracker, even a pure white-hat type devoted to fighting the good fight, has played with the tools of the virus writer, and I’m quite a bit closer to my black-hat roots than most who walk my side of the line. Once upon a time, I’d done a hell of a lot more than muck about with viral tools; I’d gone ahead and written my very own Fate-targeted doomsday virus designed to eat applications for breakfast, operating systems for lunch, and hardware for dinner.

It was called E-bola, and I’d even had a sort of test run with the beta version in the Fate Core itself when I used it to ream out the worm Discord had set to de-destinizing the threads there, or whatever you want to call a process that results in a thread being permanently removed from Fate’s control. My actions then had resulted in the death of my cousin Laric, who was probably the only other member of the younger generation of Fate that I cared for besides Cerice.

The guilt I’d felt over his death had almost driven me to delete the whole damn thing, but that ultimately felt too much like playing the quitter. Instead, I’d refined the daylights out of E-bola until I had an exquisite tool optimized for kicking the shit out of Fate. It was a truly vicious piece of software. It was also a hell of a lot gentler than Persephone’s Fate Breaker.

I sighed and typed,
You’re right, my friend. Pull up E-bola, and let’s set it up along with the rest.

We’ve got to do
something
, and it’s better to give Fate the equivalent of an occasionally fatal
version of the flu than the black plague on steroids. Oh, and please prep the update to Scorched
Earth as well.

Once upon a time, Scorched Earth 1.0 had accidentally crashed the mweb. After a second such attempt had failed and gotten Melchior countervirused into the bargain, I’d created a 2.0 version and kept it updated. I was dead certain that with the access Persephone had bought me, version 2.8.4 would be more than adequate to the task of shutting down the mweb for a couple of days with this third release.

[http://Olympus.net] Olympus.net was simpler, both as a coding problem and morally. There were very few AIs involved there because Athena didn’t trust them. And, frankly, while Zeus might be the king of the gods, he mostly tried to let the job do itself, so none of the

[http://Olympus.net] Olympus.net systems did anything that was of really Earth-shattering importance. We pretty much just stepped Persephone’s virus down from absolute burn-it-to-the-ground-and-salt-the-ashes destruction to start-it-on-fire-and-figure-they’ll-put-it-out-eventually and set it up for release at need.

That left Hades, and us, strung out and in serious need of a break. It arrived—as such things so often do in my life—in the form of a brand-new piece of bad news.

Melchior and I were working in the office/sorcerer’s lair above my bedroom. A small, hexagonal tower room, it’s reached by a spiral stair in the back of the walk-in closet. It had appeared there not long after my insomnia started to get really ugly. At the moment, said office held an extremely comfortable chair with an attached laptop desk opposite a small silver hexagram set into the marble floor and a whole lot of sunlight and fresh air. At other times, say when I have need of a cabinet or two of electronics, they’re always there.

I had just leaned my head back against the cushion of the chair and closed my screen-strained eyes when a cool shadow fell on me. Absently, I held out my right hand for the drink I’d been hoping Haemun would bring me.

What I got instead was the briefest touch of a finger sliding along my palm and a whispered,

“Ravirn? I must speak with you.”

It was a voice I’d heard often in my dreams of late and one I had never expected to hear at Raven House.

Alarmed, I sat up. “Persephone, what brings you from your gardens?” To my knowledge, she had not left them once in the two years of her freedom.

“Danger to you.” She stood above me, her face grave. “Of the direst sort.”

“Tell me about it.” Which was not at all what I wanted to say. But then, I would never use the sort of language that came to mind then in front of Persephone.

“Your incursion into Olympus’s servers has been detected. Since your last visit to my gardens, Athena and I have been quietly at war with one another in the datasphere of Mount Olympus—

she trying to root out my embedded viruses and back doors, I replacing them as soon she does so.

She is on maximum alert, and the malware I lent you is of a version since rendered obsolete. Had I known you needed access, I’d have sent you an update, but now it is too late, and Athena knows that you have moved against Olympus.”

I slid out of my chair. “Melchior, Goblin. Please.”

“What do you need?” he asked as soon as he’d shifted back into a shape with lips.

“I don’t know, but I’m thinking that we’re going to need to move up our production schedule. A lot.” I turned to Persephone. “How soon will Athena be here?”

“Not while I hold the doors between the worlds closed. She cannot enter here until I remove myself, or let her through. That’s why I had to come in person.” Persephone smiled one of her sad smiles. “Besides, she has other, more pressing concerns at the moment. I have shut down computing on Olympus for the foreseeable future.”

“How recently?” I asked, with icy serpents crawling loops around my spine.

“Seconds ago.”

“Good. Melchior—”

“I know, full on E-bola and Scorched Earth now. On it, Boss.” His eyes went faraway. When they returned to seeing the here and now, he spoke again. “Fate is going dark as we speak, and the mweb will follow it down shortly. What do you want to do about Hades? We haven’t had time to code up anything milder than the complete destruction option Persephone gave us.”

“At this point, I think we’re committed. Nuke him.”

“You know,” said Mel, with an evil grin, “this one I’m going to truly enjoy.” His attention went away again while he ran the program that would return Hades’ control networks to the Bronze Age.

“Persephone, thank you.” I wanted to take her hand and give it the sort of courtier’s kiss I had learned in the Houses of Fate, but I restrained the urge. “I have so much more I wish I had time to say, but I just signed what is very likely my own death warrant, and now I have to move quickly if I’m going make it worth the cost.”

I’m an optimist, and I really would have loved to pretend for Persephone’s sake that I had a snowball’s chance of winning
and
living through the experience, but I will not lie to her, and I was about to go up against the goddess Nemesis acting with some significant portion of Necessity’s powers behind her. Persephone nodded, and, save for a slight fading of her smile, that was the extent of her emotional response.

“Is there anything more I can do to help you?” she asked.

“I’m afraid nothing comes to mind.” I glanced at Melchior, who had just fully returned to us.

“Can you dump everything we know about what’s happened to date onto a memory crystal so that Persephone gets the explanation she deserves but I can’t afford the time it takes to give?” He nodded, and his expression went distant once again.

I returned my attention to Persephone as another thought passed through my mind. “There is one thing. If you’re willing, you could take Haemun with you when you go. He doesn’t deserve what Athena is going to do to this place. I know he’s a satyr and a he and so not your favorite type of people, and I won’t ask you to keep him in your service, just find a home for him. Perhaps with Thalia.”

“That I can do. Anything else?”

“No. I would have preferred to keep you out of this entirely because the absolute last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was see you suffer any more hurts, but I’m afraid my use of your software has precluded that option. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.” She took my left hand between her own and laughed the gayest laugh I’d heard from her since the hour of her escape from Hades. “Silly Raven, I would not have given you the tools had I not been willing to bear the cost. You were my salvation. Never think that I would begrudge you anything it is in me to give. Besides that, there are other considerations, not least of which is the satisfaction of finally delivering my parting gift to Hades.” That was when Melchior spat out a memory crystal and handed it to me. I passed it along to Persephone.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. If I don’t see you again, know that freeing you was the purest joy I’ve ever known, and that nothing that has come since makes me regret it in the least. Were I the sort to worship, my goddess would be the spring.”

“Then take my blessing, and know that you walk ever in the favor of the lady of spring.” She lifted my hand and placed the briefest of kisses on my palm. “Know also that if Hades takes you, I will make him pay for it. Now, go.”

I took the steps down three at a time, shouting for Cerice and Alecto to be ready as I went. They met me along with Fenris, Laginn, and Haemun at the base of the main stairs.

“What’s happened?” asked Cerice.

“I just put a down payment on Shara’s last request. The powers are down, and now we have to move.”

“It were better had you warned us,” said Alecto, her voice acid.

“And better still if I hadn’t screwed up and so had no time to warn you,” I said with just as much acid. “But it’s a little late for that now.”

“Why didn’t you call
me
?” asked Fenris, and hangdog suddenly had a new poster face.

“It’s not your fight,” I said. “And I won’t ask you to fight it.” He growled and rolled his eyes. “I begin to see why everyone always calls you an idiot. In this world, you are my pack. Pack backs pack.” He couldn’t have sounded more emphatic.

Laginn, perched on his back, bobbed an equally emphatic yes.

“Let me just plead guilty to idiocy then and thank you for joining us. Melchior can attest to my near-divine gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

“Or failing to say the right one,” Cerice added quietly.

“That, too.” I glanced at Haemun. “Persephone is in my office. I asked her to take you with her when she leaves. In the meantime, you might want to fetch her a drink or something.”