The Eternal Prison (31 page)

gone.
”

 

With a sudden hum, the lights faded back on. All around us, consoles started clicking back to life, surprisingly loud in the enclosed space.

 

I groaned, pushing myself up onto my aching legs. She looked up at me, and for a second there was a glint of something alive in her eye.

 

“If my partner had been there, that day we flushed you,” she said, nodding, “we would have nailed you.”

 

We stared at each other, each of us with a pleasant, near smile on our faces. As Marko and Grisha stormed back into the room, I watched the light in her one eye fade, like whatever piece of her that had just flared up was burning off, disappearing back into darkness.

 

“We good?” I asked without looking away from her.

 

“We’re hot,” Marko replied. “Good is a whole other category. Let me get my bearings. I’ve never been in the fucking Star before.”

 

I turned away from her to look at Grisha. “You?”

 

He shook his head. “No. Give us a few moments, Avery, to familiarize ourselves.” He shrugged. “Most of this tech, I would think, was stolen from SSF and other government agencies anyway. We should be familiar with most of it.”

 

Marko sat down in one of the thin chairs, and I waited for it to collapse under his fleshy presence. He began gesturing.

 

“Most of the data in here is
seriously
encrypted—some is even being shredded off the drives as I speak. But access to the comm ports is not restricted, so we can still use this as a dummy terminal.”

 

“Sometimes when you talk,” I said cheerfully as the wash of jargon swept past me, “I just want to pinch you, you know that?”

 

He half turned to speak back at us. “I should talk slow and in small words, huh? Basically, you’re welcome to use the tech here as long as you don’t try to touch anyone’s stuff. It’s a hacker’s code—free for all as long as you play by the rules. So I think tunneling out to the SSF servers won’t be a problem. Getting into those servers and finding what we need—
that
will be the problem.”

 

I studied the Techie. “You’re surprisingly… happy, Mr. Marko.”

 

He nodded. “You know what, Mr. Cates?” he said without pausing in his work. “My whole life I’ve wanted to walk away from the job. Ever since I tested into it in the first place. I never wanted to be police, even TA police. I’m ten fucking years old, they give me a test, a bunch of silly questions, a bunch of stupid games, and suddenly they announce I’m going to be a TA in the SSF. So I was. And I have fucking hated it—except playing with the tech. I wanted to ditch. But I was afraid. And now it’s happened—I’ve been forced out—and I’m not dead. I didn’t immediately explode or have an aneurysm or anything like that. I’m
free.
”

 

I thought about pointing out how often
free
turned into
dead
in my world but decided not to rain on Marko’s parade, since he was busily gesturing at the console before him. Grisha’s wire glasses—still cracked—reflected the dim screens as he followed along.

 

After a moment, Marko started talking again for no reason I could discern. “Like any self-respecting Technical Associate, I have several exploits carefully set up for just such an emergency. Fake accounts, open nodes, that sort of thing.”

 

Grisha nodded. “Very nicely done, Mr. Marko.”

 

Marko smiled as a familiar logo of a globe surrounded by stars sizzled on the screen in front of him. “And here we are: the System Security Force.” He leaned forward. “Okay, we don’t have a lot of time. The network speeds are terrible—looks to me like a major conduit has been cut, probably by the army—and my back door won’t stay open for long. We’ve got maybe five minutes before they start back tracing.” He spun suddenly in his seat and looked at me. “Who are you looking for, Mr. Cates?”

 

I walked over to him, stepping over my avatar, which had finally gone quiet a few minutes before. “The name he gave me was Michaleen Garda. He was in Chengara.” I grimaced. “I don’t know much else you can search on.” Gall had said he’d been using that name exclusively, that any records would be tagged with that.

 

“Okay. Chengara was its own data island… here,” Marko said and began humming tunelessly as he moved his hands. “Okay, cross-referencing on the name. Varying the spelling. There he is—crap.”

 

Grisha and Marko looked at each other for a moment.

 

“Crap?” I asked. “Is that a fucking
technical
term, Mr. Marko?” I hated Techies. They always knew things ten seconds before you did.

 

“Michaleen Garda is just an alias, I can tell you that,” Marko continued, looking back at the screens. “Because the name is an empty reference with a pointer tag. That means his actual file is referenced under something other than that name. But they purposefully filed him under Michaleen Garda in Chengara. Because he must be a fucking Person of Immense Interest.” He pointed at a screen as if it were supposed to mean anything to me. “His actual file is attached to the private physical drive of the Director of Internal Affairs.”

 

“Marin,” I said, frowning. I glanced back at Krasa, but she was staring at the floor again as if it held the answers to all her problems. “So you have to get into his data.”

 

Grisha snorted, and the two Techies exchanged another look. “This is the
private physical drive
of the Director, Mr. Cates. His Prime.
The
Director. If anything in this world can be said to actually be Richard Marin anymore, it’s his Prime unit. The Prime has a huge database that is physically separated from the rest of the network. I’ve never seen specs, of course, but there are rumors, and the main rumor is that it contains a complete copy of the entire SSF database, plus his own private data. It is
not connected
to the SSF nodes, so… well, I simply can’t get into it. Not without physical access to the Prime. Which is in Moscow.”

 

He said this last with the calm serenity of a man who was pretty sure he’d made his point. I just kept staring at him. “You’re telling me Marin has a database no one else can access?”

 

“This is Marin’s
brain.
Okay? He’s got hundreds of avatars pumping data at him every second. He accumulates data at an amazing rate. Most of it can just be pushed back at the SSF servers for storage, and he can call it up any time he needs to, but a lot of it needs to be his eyes only, you know? The Prime is always in Moscow because that’s where his fucking servers are, and they are the size of a very large building.”

 

I thought about this. One way to secure data was certainly to deny any access to it whatsoever. “Marin talks to his avatars,” I said. “Get to it through one of them.”

 

Grisha and Marko looked at each other again, and Grisha straightened up. “Not
impossible,
Avery,” he said slowly. “But difficult. Marin is on own network, yes? Proprietary protocol. The avatars are capable of pushing data up to the Prime and accepting data and commands downstream
from
the Prime. They cannot, by design, push commands back to the Prime, so you cannot somehow forge a packet that would cause the Prime to simply transmit this data to you. Such packets do not exist in his protocol. You can
request
data through an avatar. If we could acquire a Marin avatar and somehow keep it from triggering its own panic codes—which would remove it from Marin’s network immediately—and then somehow bypass its internal security to induce it to make such a request, we might fool the Prime into delivering specifics on the little fucker.”

 

“I assume,” I said slowly, “that the Prime is pretty well defended in Moscow?”

 

Behind me, Krasa snorted, but I just watched Grisha and Marko both break into wide smiles.

 

“Oh yes, Avery,” Grisha said. “The Prime is very well defended. Aside from well-armed units and fortifications, there is also Internal Affairs, yes? His Worms. Avatars, very fast, very strong.”

 

“Not to mention,” Marko said with a happy cheer I wanted to smack off his face, “this little war you might have noticed. Moscow’s been under siege for weeks now. They’re fucking eating each other in that burg, they’ve been cut off by the army for so long.”

 

“I have heard this, yes,” Grisha said, shrugging at me. “I would not recommend going to Moscow.”

 

I nodded, just to see the look of dismay flash onto Marko’s face. “We’ll go if we have to, but let’s try the easier way first. If we got a Marin avatar, could you hack it?”

 

The smiles faded, and they looked at each other again.

 

“We
do
have Miles Amblen,” Marko said slowly.

 

Grisha blinked at him and then looked at me. “Probably not, Avery. But we could try.”

 

“Then let’s try that before we steal a flight to fucking Moscow of all places.”

 

“Okay,” Marko said, exhaling an explosive breath. “We have Amblen and his lab. How do we get a Marin avatar?”

 

I smiled. “I’m Avery Cates, standing here with two recently burned System Cops,” I said. “Let’s go get arrested.”

 

 

 

 

XXVII

STILL STANDING IN DEFIANCE OF THE KNOWN LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

 

 

 

 

Getting arrested was proving more difficult than I would have imagined.

 

There was a war on, of course, and the spanking-new army that the Undersecretaries had lavished yen on for the last year or two was building pontoon bridges across the Hudson and East rivers, not to mention bombing the fuck out of what was left of New York. Which wasn’t much to begin with. A year ago I’d been a Person of Interest, number two on the SSF Wanted List behind Cainnic Orel. A year ago getting one of Marin’s avatars to show up to personally—well, sort of personally—put a boot in my ass wouldn’t have been that hard. Now, Marin had bigger problems.

 

I kicked at a chunk of rebar-sprouting concrete and squinted through the smoke rising out of what was left of The Rock. The night before had been an endless carpet bombing, and I’d spent it huddled in the goddamn sewers with Grisha, Krajian, and Marko, listening to the Techie whimper every time the whole world shivered and rained dust down onto us. Grisha had gone to sleep, breathing deeply, calm and unconcerned, leaving me and the cop to stare at each other from across the narrow strip of oily water that flowed down the old pipes.

 

“You okay?” I’d asked, shouting over the concussions.

 

She’d stared at me for a moment like she’d forgotten I was there. “No” was all she said. I wasn’t sure if I liked her way of saying absolutely nothing and staring at walls like they were moving just for her. On the one hand, it made conversation difficult. On the other hand, I’d never really wanted to talk to System Cops anyway.

 

We’d come up in the morning covered in white dust to find the whole fucking island beat to hell by Ruberto’s forces. As I’d stood there near the old Stadium, coughing up a small ton of dirt, a line of Stormers, four across and shining in their white uniforms, turned a corner and jogged past me, paying me absolutely no attention as they ran.

 

When I’d turned, I’d found Grisha next to me, stretching and yawning like a man who’d slept well. He blinked and nodded. “Fucking war, eh?” he said with a nod. “Center cannot hold.”

 

That had been the morning. We’d migrated uptown, finding our way blocked by rubble twice, Midtown decimated. I’d seen downtown torn to pieces by Marin after the Plague, all the old, narrow streets razed, letting sunlight and oxygen into spaces that had been richly rotting for decades, putting down invisible roots. But that had been methodical, one block at a time, flushing the population that had clung to life and tearing down their ancient nests. This was overnight, the core of the city flattened, Cop Central reduced to dust and smoke. I could feel the heat thrumming up from the melted ground through my battered boots.

 

Across the field of pulverized city, the fucking old church was still standing. The beat-up Monks used to hang around it all day begging, and it looked exactly as it always had, two spires of blotchy stone, delicately carved circular windows above the three massive doors. It was as if the church had been built right after the bombing.

 

“Just think of all the cops flat like paper under this,” Grisha said, spitting prodigiously onto the rubble. “That must cheer you, no, Avery? Man who once tried to kill every cop in New York.”

 

“Fucking hell,” I muttered, gesturing around. “There won’t be much for Ruberto to
run
if he keeps this shit up.”

 

“The System is big,” Grisha said somberly. “You’re stuck in New York too much, you think Manhattan is all there is.”

 

I grunted. Marko was struggling toward me, picking his way across the ruins like he had the ankles of a little girl.

 

“Mr. Cates,” Marko panted, his hair waving gently, majestically in the wind. “I have a suggestion.”

 

I nodded. “Well, looks like we’re not going to destroy any civilizations today, Mr. Marko, so I have some unexpected time on my schedule.” My lungs burned from the bitter smoke, and I convulsed into a coughing fit, bones rattling and blood stopping up in my head like jelly.