Springboard (7 page)

“Can I see the background AI data?” he asked.

Bretton nodded, a look of quiet approval on his face at the question. Jay had often found it useful to impress people in their own specialties, so he’d done some studies on the background HBM and AI modeling before coming over. The code that appeared to replace the landscape was the inside of the sim model—what made it work, the physics and lighting, the object scripting.

By looking at this information, they could monitor more carefully the impact of the intruding virus.

The lines of code executed rapidly as Bretton took the speed up a notch, rolling upward like parts on a conveyer belt. And then suddenly, they started to change.

“The key modeling factors just went crazy,” said Bretton.

Within seconds errors began bringing down parts of the simulation.

Jay nodded. It was a virus all right. Someone had introduced it into the system, it had waited for the right moment, and then,
pow
.

Knockout.

The question was, how?

He looked at Bretton.

“I’m stumped,” the man admitted. “I’ve been all over the I/O going back for the last year, and there’s
nothing
. The transducer network routers haven’t sent anything across, timed or not. They’re clean.”

“Physical memory?” asked Jay. “A disk? Flashmem stick?”

“Locked out without authentication and logging,” Bretton said. “And smuggling one in or out would be . . . difficult.”

Jay stared at the screens, thinking. There was no other way in. But something had gotten in.

The old Sherlock Holmes adage came to mind. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

There had to be some other way.

All irritation forgotten, Jay sat down and started thinking.

He smiled.

Abe Kent stopped at the desk to pick up ammo and headphones. He set his shooting bag down and looked at the man behind the counter.

“Gunny.”

“Colonel. Are you shooting the old Colt today, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Is your ring current, sir?”

Kent smiled. “It is.” Gunny was referring to the smart-gun chips, which had to be reprogrammed and checked every month. Kent didn’t think much of that program. Net Force-issue weapons were all rigged with electronic chips, one in your side arm and the second in a ring, bracelet, or wristwatch. If you used your own piece on duty, you had to have it so wired. Without the ring or watch in close proximity to the weapon, it would not fire.

The colonel knew that was probably a good idea in some circumstances. It would sure be nice if your neighbor’s little six-year-old girl couldn’t cook one off if she came across your pistol in the bedside table. Of course, anybody with a brain wouldn’t have a handgun where a little girl who didn’t know what it was about could come across it. If you had guns in your house, then you needed to make sure everybody who lived there knew the safety rules about them. There weren’t any kids in Kent’s life, but he still kept his old slabside .45 locked in a box when it wasn’t on his person.

Any technology, such as the smart-gun stuff, that added an extra possibility of failure to a pistol when it was in your hand and when you needed it to save your life? Well, that was a bad idea. Even without the smart-gun tech, guns weren’t perfect. Sometimes they just misfired or otherwise malfunctioned due to their mechanical natures.

If you didn’t know how to use the thing safely and couldn’t keep it from falling into the wrong hands, you ought not to be carrying it. No, the only argument he’d ever heard that made even a little sense to him was that these rings would keep somebody from taking your piece off your corpse and using it to shoot at your coworkers. Even that was foolish, though, he thought. If you were dead, somebody made you that way, which meant that not only were they armed, but they were likely to have better weapons than yours, so increasing the chances of yours misfiring just when you needed it to keep them from taking it was just plain stupid.

Kent took the box of ammunition, his hearing protectors, and his gun bag, and went to his assigned lane. There were only a few shooters in the range, most of them using handguns. As he got to his lane, he saw Julio Fernandez in the next one over.

“Captain.”

“Colonel. It’s just Julio now, sir. I’m a civilian. I appreciate that you still let me come in to use the range, though.”

“How is John? I haven’t talked to him for a couple of weeks.”

“He’s fine. I expect you’ve heard about his visit to Commander Thorn.”

“I heard.”

“Going to be a leatherneck again,” Fernandez said.

“So it seems.” Kent didn’t want to go too far down that road right now, so he changed the subject: “You still remember how to shoot that Beretta?”

“Yes, sir. I also remember how last time we shot together, I managed to beat you and that antique .45 of yours real good.”

“Three-hundredths of a second after five screens isn’t what I’d call ‘real good,’ Julio. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘barely.’ ”

“You thinking to win your money back, Colonel?”

“And then some.”

Fernandez laughed. “Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute. You want to pick the scenario?”

“I wouldn’t want to take advantage, since I probably practice more than you. You choose.”

“ ‘Gunfight at Red Rock?’ ” Julio asked. “Twenty bucks for the match, best three of five screens?”

Kent nodded. “Number of rounds?”

“Let’s keep it revolver-neutral. That’s what the bad guys have. Six shots per screen.”

Kent nodded. He had seven rounds in his piece, one in the barrel and six in the magazine. He had one spare magazine on his belt, his carry backup, and five more already loaded in his gun bag. He pulled the spares from his belt and bag and lined them up on the shooting bench. “Crank it in,” Kent said.

He pulled his pistol from his holster, pinch-checked to be sure he had one in the pipe, then popped the magazine out, checked that, and pushed it back in. He reholstered the handgun and adjusted his headphones a little, then nodded.

“Light it when you’re ready, son.”

Downrange, the target computer generated an image. One moment, Kent’s lane was empty, the next, the air shimmered and two Old West gunfighters stood facing him twenty feet away, hands held over their holstered six-shooters. They wore black cowboy hats and boots, black trousers and checkered shirts, handkerchiefs tied bandanna-style around their necks, and seemed real enough to look at. This was a VR holographic projection, and the computer was smart enough to tell where your bullets passed through them—assuming you shot and hit them before they did you. Fortunately, their bullets were only photonic—

“Draw—!” one of the gunslingers yelled. That was the start signal for this scenario.

Kent was already moving. Before the gunslinger finished speaking, Kent had pulled his model 1911, thumbed the safety catch off, and shoved it forward, one-handed. At this range, he didn’t need to use the sights, he just pointed the gun as he would his finger. He fired once at the pistoleer on the right, then shifted his arm a hair and fired again at the one on the left. One, two—!

Both the phantoms had already cleared leather with their own sidearms, but were still bringing them up as Kent cooked off the second round.

When you had done this particular action five or ten thousand times, it was almost a reflex.

“Arrgh!” one of the bad guys said. He sounded more like a pirate than a Western desperado.

“You got me, you sidewinding varmint!” the other one said.

Both fell.

Kent smiled. Back in the Old West, especially the frontier towns, the locals had, according to the history he’d read, cursed worse than fleets of drunken sailors. The foulest, most Anglo-Saxon four-letter words peppered every conversation, and linked together in obscene strings that would singe the hair off a Marine D.I. The image most people had of cowboys came from old black-and-white movies, made in the days when such language was not allowed on the silver screen. The Old West was not quaint, save in fiction.

He checked his score screen. Two shots, two A-zone hits, time 0.73 seconds. Not that fast for a cowboy action fast-draw expert from a tied-down holster, but not bad from a service rig in street clothes.

He still had five rounds left, but he dropped the magazine—the floor had a rubber mat here so the magazine wasn’t damaged when it hit—and shoved one of the spare magazines home in a tactical reload. He clicked the safety on and reholstered the piece.

Next to him, Fernandez said, “That one-handed point-shooting will get you in trouble at longer range, Colonel.”

Kent looked at the score screen. Fernandez had also hit both his opponents, but was three-hundredths of a second slower.

“That may be,” Kent said. “But at short range, it beat you.”

“It’s early. Get ready. Sir.”

Kent grinned.

Wu emerged from the bathroom in a thick white terry-cloth robe, feeling cleaner and very much relaxed. The hot shower he had taken accounted for the cleanliness. Mayli, the beautiful and accomplished undercover operative he employed, accounted for the feeling of relaxation. She lay naked upon the bed, grinning at him like a well-fed cat. Her perfume, something spicy and subtle, mixed with the scent of her own musk.

Wu had a family, of course. There was his dutiful wife, who was in Beijing, probably attending to their six grandchildren. He also had two sons and a daughter, each of whom had provided him with the politically correct pair of those grandchildren.

But Wu had needs, and his wife had long ago stopped caring to adequately meet those, so he took his carnal pleasures elsewhere. Mayli there on the bed was able to handle those needs with one hand tied behind her. Sometimes both hands tied . . .

Wu grinned at the thought. He was not without wit.

“Are you going to shower?” he asked.

“Later.”

“Anything new on our computer whiz?”

She shrugged. “Yesterday he was approached by Data-Soft U.S., via a cutout in Hong Kong, and offered a job. Two hundred thousand dollars American a year, a car, an apartment in Renton, Washington, profit-sharing, a medical plan. Help getting out of the country, and resident status once he arrives. A not-unattractive offer. I wouldn’t really mind living in the States as the wife of a well-paid computer nerd.”

“And what did he say to this?”

Wu moved to the bed and sat on the edge. He shucked the robe and turned his back toward the woman. “Work on my left shoulder a bit, would you? I strained a muscle during training.”

She slid over and began to knead at his deltoid. She had very strong and skilled hands.

She said, “He has not replied to the offer yet. But he won’t take it.”

“And you know this how?”

“I told him not to.”

“And he thinks this highly of you?”

“He has mentioned marriage.”

“I thought you wouldn’t mind living in the U.S.?”

“I wouldn’t. But I told him he was worth more and should hold out for a better offer. I will need a large house, an automobile of my own, and an extravagant lifestyle.”

He smiled. Of course.

Her fingers dug into the muscle, hard. It hurt, but it was a good hurt.

“Ah.”>

“How did you hurt your shoulder?”

“Climbing the rope.”

“You stay in excellent shape.”

“For a man my age?”

“For a man of any age.”

“You flatter me.”

“Of course. That is part of what I do best. Still, it is true—you have mirrors, you know this.”

He smiled. That was the thing about working with a professional. No illusions. His star was rising, and Mayli, nobody’s fool, knew it. She would benefit as long as she was of use to him, and he would benefit from her, in a number of ways. It was good to know where you stood in a relationship. He did not trust her, not past a certain point, but until that place was reached, she would serve. It would not hurt to have an agent in the United States, and once he had accomplished his tasks, there was no reason why Shing could not be allowed to chase the American dollar on their shores with his new wife.

“How is that?” she asked.

He turned around and reached for her. “Better,” he said.

Seurat threw his comset across the room, the small device making a muffled
thump
as it hit the soft leather chair he kept in the corner and tended to use mostly for such moments. Only when he was alone did he permit himself such luxury, and even then he mitigated his anger with forethought.

Replacing a comset with every bad piece of news would be shamefully wasteful, even when the news was this bad.

He hurried towards the garage, grabbing his wallet and a set of keys for the old 914 he favored for going into Paris. The small, mid-engine Porsche was easier to navigate in the narrow streets of the big city.

Thousands of CyberNation’s residents had been dropped into blackness across Europe, with outages and other interruptions of service. Milo Saens, his chief security expert, had related several disturbing ramifications of the incident in addition to the most important one:

The failure was the result of sabotage.

Seurat slapped the garage door opener and jumped down the small flight of steps leading into what had once been a wine cellar, but which now included a space for his cars.