Fool's War (39 page)

“Your Guild’s an arrogant bunch, aren’t they?” Lipinski pulled the searcher over into an active buffer and set to work, sketching orders with his right hand and tapping keys with his left.

I didn’t used to think so,
thought Dobbs, but she didn’t say anything. She slid into the chair in front of the relief boards and activated them. “I’m going to bring in a couple of things from my desk to help, all right?”

“Sure,” he said without looking up. “The more the merrier.”

I hope so.
She called up a pair of trackers she had built herself. They were small, light and slow as molasses. In the net activity that surrounded the Guild, they’d be no more than ripples in the stream.

She bit her lip to keep herself from asking Lipinski how he was doing and concentrated on checking over her own handiwork. This was no time to leave holes. When she’d finished her checks, she altered the trackers’ entire search routine. They had originally been designed for finding viruses and invaders. Now they would look for an entranceway.

As little as she liked it, Dobbs saw no choice but to go in through the Drawbridge. There were several windows and back doors, but those were used exclusively for getting out of Guild Hall in a hurry. Anything trying to get in that way would be infinitely more conspicuous than anything trying to get in through the heavily trafficked drawbridge. Which was, of course, part of the point of having them. Given time, Lipinski might have been able to spot one of the windows and attempt to make use of it, never knowing he had signaled his presence by going entirely the wrong way.

Finally, Lipinski said, “Is this more to your liking, ‘Dama?”

Dobbs leaned across. The blueprint had all the additions she’d suggested and he’d managed to extend the connectors even farther than she’d hoped. Guild security was not so different from other programs. Information shot through the Fool’s network in packets, just like any other network. So, Guild security looked for fast, free-moving blips. It also looked for the large, solidly compressed masses of Fools. Slow-moving strings and shadows might just get by as background noise, especially if they could find something large and non-sentient to trail behind.

“That’s perfect, Lipinski,” she said, meaning it. “What I want to do is send the trackers to find the front door and then send your searcher in after them.”

“Trackers?” Lipinski’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean you don’t know the way into your own Guild?”

“No, not from out here, I don’t,” she confessed. Lipinski didn’t actually squirm, but he obviously did not like being reminded so abruptly of her —
How to put it?
Dobbs wondered. — Special access privileges.

“All right.” Lipinski lifted his hands away from the board and leaned back in the chair. “It does make me wonder why I’m here though.”

Dobbs laid her hand on her breast and mustered a shocked look. “Well, you don’t expect me to drop these things into that soup do you? Yuch!” She shook her hand as if trying to clean something off it. “I’m just here to tell you what to avoid.”

“Oh, great. Now you’re not only a Fool, you’re a ground-side pilot.” Lipinski leaned forward. Dobbs rewarded his quip with a soft chuckle. Lipinski pulled Dobbs trackers over to his active board. She had already opened their authorization to him, so he could set them in motion immediately.

Dobbs slaved her monitors to his boards so she could see what he saw, and to some extent control it. She blanked out the heading on one of the keys and wrote
FREEZE
across it. On the board, she wrote the series of commands that could halt the searcher and attached them to the re-named key.

Lipinski’s gaze flickered to the new label, and then up to her face.

“If I see anything suspicious, I want to be able to stop the searcher without having to yell at you.”

Lipinski accepted that with a shrug. He didn’t waste any more time. He focused the main view screen on one of the few threads of light that ran from the Guild to the Pasadena.

Enlarged, the image fractured. Instead of steady lines, it looked more like a cluster of fireflies, some of which carried long strings between them.

The graphic, Dobbs knew, was little more than a crude map. It could give general locations and a decent overview. The vital information was contained in the long columns of numbers that appeared on the secondary boards. Those indicated load shifts, capacity, and new entries, as well as the nature of the packets swarming around them.

Dobbs could read all of it, if she had time. The Guild drilled the codes into all of its members. Lipinski, though, could take it all in at a glance, as if it were printed English. That, more than anything else, was the reason she needed him. Perhaps she could find the data she needed using her own searchers, but Lipinski could find it faster, and time was most definitely of the essence.

A whole row of numbers flicked over to maximum.

“Well, there’s your entrance.” Lipinski’s pen was already activating the recall command. “Isn’t it about time we talked about security?”

Dobbs hesitated. Then, almost angry with herself for not being willing to say it, she told him, “There’s a non-sentient coordination program that’s responsible for spotting everything that moves and then either routing it or stopping it. But, considering the circumstances, there’ll be at least one Guild member on sentry.”

To Lipinski’s credit, he didn’t hesitate for even a second. He activated his searcher and with a few short hand commands, lowered it slowly into the net. His gaze fastened itself on the numeric readouts.

“And of course,” he said, “any… member who notices something unauthorized in your network will stop it themselves.”

“Of course,” replied Dobbs drily.

“Thought so.” Two rows of the figures now matched up perfectly. Dobbs glanced at the main screen. A thin, slow, emerald thread extended into the white guild net.

They had made it through the Drawbridge. Dobbs’ heart began to pound slowly, heavily.

“So, we need to duck the…
 
membership.” Lipinski’s eyes never flickered from the screens. Dobbs realized this might be how he picked up his habit of talking to walls and floors. “Can you at least want to tell me what I should be looking for?”

“Anything that moves.” As she spoke the numbers flickered so fast it could have been a glitch in the board lighting. “Like that.”

It did it again. Dobbs hit the
FREEZE
key.

“And what,” said Lipinski calmly. “Was that?”

“The sentry,” said Dobbs. The numbers stayed steady for a good twenty seconds. “Okay, we should be clear. Move slow.”

Lipinski considered the scene in front of him. He wrote his commands carefully on the board and touched the two activation keys. The display changed, one number per nervous heartbeat until the six-digit coordinates had ticked over and they had moved two inches.

The screen flickered.

“Damn,” hissed Dobbs under her breath and hit
FREEZE
again.

“Didn’t think they let you swear,” said Lipinski, picking out the next set of coordinates.

“They don’t let me break into the Guild’s main data hold either,” she answered, watching the numbers change and trying not to wish they would hurry. If they moved too fast now, someone would spot them. They had to be glacial. It was their only protection. “I’m experimenting with rebellion.”

“We’re both experimenting with rebellion,” Lipinski reminded her.

“That’s all right.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll both be experimenting with unemployment.”

She shouldn’t have said that, because it allowed her to wonder what would really happen if she were caught. There were no non-guild Fools. There were on-line members, field members, and station members. That was all.

 
Except maybe it wasn’t.

Lipinski moved the scan gently to the next sector. The counter flicked off the numbers as the scan commenced. The screen display stayed steady. The bottom row of stats flashed green.

“Got it,” breathed Dobbs. “All right. We’re looking for anybody who made an emergency return here, or who doesn’t have a code in the current activities entry.”

“What do you guys do when somebody dies?” Lipinski steered the searcher to a different sub-sector.

“Fools don’t die,” she said and Verence’s memory squeezed her heart.

“You just fade away?” Lipinski cocked an eyebrow towards her.

“Something like that, yes.” Her index finger hovered over the
FREEZE
command, but the screen stayed steady.

Thank you, Cyril. Thank you.

The board beeped once. Success.

“Finally.” Lipinski wrote a new set of coordinates and a new speed on the display. Dobbs opened her mouth and closed it again. Lipinski was preparing to leave as slowly as they had entered.

Ground-side pilot,
she chided herself.

The screen flickered twice. Dobbs stabbed her finger on the
FREEZE
command. The display stopped dead. Dobbs’ heart filled her mouth. She pictured the Fool inside circling the strange signal, lifting it up, reaching inside it to see what was there, and finding something totally unfamiliar, and totally unauthorized.

But the screen stayed steady. Dobbs wished fiercely that she was in there. She should have gone in. She could lie in there. She could fast talk the other members. She’d know who that little flicker was. Cohen, or Brooke, Guild Master Havelock, or a total stranger. She could reach into them and make them understand…

I could get spotted and chased out in three seconds, she reminded herself.

“Okay.” She squeezed Lipinski’s shoulder. “Try it.”

Lipinski re-wrote the travel commands and the signal started its slow glide back to them.

After another eon, the display wrote COMPLETED across itself. Dobbs let out a long breath and felt all the strength in her knees run away like water.

“Damn, we are good!” Lipinski squeezed her hand where it rested on the counter. Dobbs hesitated just one second before she pulled her hand away and used it to fish out her pen and tap the
READOUT
selection on the open menu.

Their slow, nerve-wracking search had found five answers. Four of them were hospital level admissions; one for injuries, three for illness. The last entry was for a Fool that did not have a current location or assignment.

Theodore Curran. Registry number; five.

Five?
Dobbs’s mind almost refused to process the number.
Five?
The missing Fool was one of the Guild founders? A sick sensation crawled into her stomach. Cohen had said the stranger was somebody fast, somebody old.

How long has he been gone? What’s he doing out there? Did they let him leave? Did he run away? What’s he doing out there? Why didn’t they say anything? Tell anybody?

Why am I thinking of the Guild like I’m separate from them?

The sick sensation reached up for her heart.

“Evelyn?” said Lipinski quietly. “Are you going to be okay?”

Her shoulders drooped all on their own. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

He reached towards her but she stood up and moved away before he could touch her. “Erase that file, Rurik, and the system records. We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I don’t want to think about what’ll happen if anyone found out I showed a Houston how to crack the network. Not even Cohen would forgive me for that.

She let the stair hatch slam shut behind her and realized she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to do next. She leaned against the wall and pressed her palm against her forehead. The Guild was always the final answer. If there was a question, or if she was afraid, or in too deep, she went back to the Guild. That was the way it was. The Guild was what pulled her out of the war she had started with her birth. It gave her coherence and purpose and guidance. Where did she go now that the Guild wasn’t safe anymore?

Dobbs straightened up. She couldn’t let anybody see her like this.

It’s not the whole Guild,
she told herself as she descended the stairs.
It’s a few of the Masters, at most. We’re just proving we can be as stupid and paranoid as Human Beings, that’s all. Cohen will have some idea who we should go to with this. Maybe Brooke will have some ideas too. As soon as this is out in the open, it’ll all get sorted out. It just needs to get brought out. That’s all.

A small, irrational surge of anger ran through her as she climbed the stairs. Verence, why aren’t you here to help me? Which Guild Master do I trust without you around?

She let herself out into the Guild Hall. Her name on the entrance memory board caught her eye.

MASTER OF CRAFT EVELYN DOBBS, REPORT TO GUILD MASTER MATTHEW HAVELOCK IN CONFERENCE TWELVE.

Dobbs took a deep breath and forced her feet to move in the right direction. It was only a matter of time before she’d have to see him again anyway. It might as well be now. Once Guild Master Havelock was done with her, she could get back into the network and she and Cohen could figure out what to do next.