Authors: James Luceno
“All clear,” Harwood said from the dentist's chair.
Marz opened the garage and his and Tech's array of custom vehicles winked into virtual existence. Harwood voiced an exclamation of delight.
“Whoa! Marz, my man! All these are your designs?”
“Some of them come from books and movies,” Marz said. “But, yeah, we designed them.”
“Marz rocks!” Tech added, giving his brother a thumbs-up.
“I knew I'd picked the right wingmen,” Harwood said. “Obviously you were being modest when you described yourselves as cyberjockeys.”
“Pick whichever ship you want,” Marz said.
“I'm honored. But, in fact, I've brought my own craft. It's already loaded in the system.”
“The guitar,” Marz guessed after scrolling down the screen.
“A Flying-V, to be precise.”
Tech was tempted to select their pride and joy, the silver Aston Martin DB5—an armored ground-effect vehicle loaded with defensive software. But he recalled what Harwood had said about going in under the radar and instead chose the least flashy of the MX motocross bikes, which were common on the Network.
An instant later, Tech's visor changed modes, from transparent to active, and the grid became visible. As ever he felt as if he were free-falling, face-first, from a great height. The sight of other flyers in their various craft reinforced the sense that he, too, was at the controls of a vehicle— encased in code, as cyberjockeys said. But without his thrasher tunes and a motion-capture vest to provide the illusion of movement, the Network seemed eerily silent and remote, like a rough cut of a CGI movie waiting for a soundtrack.
Harwood's voice issued through the right earpiece of Tech's headphones. “Can you hear me?”
“Five by five.”
Harwood's rock-star guitar eased alongside Tech's MX cybercycle.
“We'll follow the Ribbon as far as the AmTel construct, then alter course and head west.”
“But Peerless is due south.”
“We're not going to approach the castle from the Ribbon. We'll use the delivery entrance.”
“Roger that.”
Tech followed, watching Harwood maneuver himself through traffic. For a lunatic hacker, there was nothing fancy about his flying. He didn't try to push too hard, and he stayed within the posted speed limits. By timing his maneuvers precisely, however, he was able to advance effortlessly through the flow, the way only nonpiloted craft did, in perfect harmony with the machine code itself.
They approached the Peerless Castle from the west, though it could have been from any direction, since the construct remained the same castle from all vantages, with turrets and crenelated towers rising from a mountainous base of ramparts and revetments. Diving for the western ramparts, they gradually fell into line with thousands of data packages queued up for receiving: e-transactions, receipts, mail, and faxes.
“Launch the Romulan soft,” Harwood told Marz. “Task the program to cloak us as shipping manifests.”
“Done,” Marz replied.
Tech watched as Harwood's guitar transformed into a document icon similar to those streaming toward the castle. His visor display indicated that the cybercycle had transformed, as well.
Skeleton Key provided them with a code for clearing the security booths located at the entry ports that dimpled the base of the castle. But Tech was unimpressed. Any cyberjockey worth his code could have gotten as far without the help of the program Harwood had bought from the Boruans at considerable expense. But they were in outlaw territory now, risking brain damage or a prison sentence if apprehended, and Tech was eating it up.
“Follow me closely,” Strange interjected.
Tech tweaked the accelerator to decrease the distance between them, as Harwood's disguised craft began to negotiate a bewildering maze of routing paths. Tech doubted that he would have been able to find his way out of the featureless labyrinth without help. Vests or no, he hoped that Marz was still managing to map their path.
“This is the same route I took ten years ago when the castle was still under construction,” Harwood said over the scrambled audio channel that allowed them to converse without being over-heard. “I'm surprised that Peerless hasn't sealed it. In fact, I can still read the code markers I inserted so I could find my way out.”
Harwood showed Tech how to detect the cleverly concealed markers—shaped like musical notes—then he pried open a port that admitted them to an active area wallpapered on both sides with hundreds of similar portals. But instead of accessing any of them, Harwood began to maneuver straight down the center toward what at first glance resembled a maintenance hatch floating directly in front of them.
“This wasn't here last time,” he said, coming to a halt in front of the circular port.
“It doesn't look newly installed,” Tech said.
“Marz, does this hatch appear on any of the charts?”
“Not even on Blueprint,” Marz replied over the scrambled channel.
“Can we open it?” Tech asked.
Harwood advanced on the gateway. “Marz, run Skeleton Key again and see if any of the passcodes will open this thing.”
Back in the office, Marz glanced at Tech and Harwood while the program opened in a corner of the screen. He clicked and dragged the image, allowing the codes to scroll down the side. He felt as if he were a safecracker waiting for the tumblers of a lock to click into place. Suddenly Skeleton Key highlighted a complex series of passcodes.
“I've got it,” Marz announced.
“Them,
actually.”
“Just as I suspected,” Harwood said. “Deploy the passcodes sequentially, Marz, and let's see what happens.”
Marz set himself to the task and a long, nervous moment later the hatch irised open. But as close as Tech and Harwood were to the portal, it was impossible to tell what lay beyond.
“Well, Tech, are you ready for some real adventure?” Harwood asked.
“I was designed ready.”
“Then here we go.”
They moved forward carefully, but they had
scarcely crossed the threshold when they were dragged deeper inside, at increasing speed. All at once, the bottom dropped away, and they began to fall, gaining even more speed. Tech thought about the abyss that opened behind the castle and wondered if they hadn't somehow left Peerless and plunged over the edge of the Escarpment.
If so, they would know soon enough.
But just as suddenly they began a steep climb. Faint light illuminated the virtual walls of a narrow conduit that twisted and helixed without vertical or horizontal intersections.
They moved through the conduit for a long while. Tech began to suspect that they had become caught in a cyberloop and that Marz would have to perform a reboot to extricate them. Then, without warning, they were outside the conduit and drifting across an expansive computerscape of rugged constructs startlingly unlike the geometric structures that graced the Network.
“What is this place?” Tech whispered into his microphone.
“I'm not sure,” Harwood said. “I've never seen anything like it.”
Poking through a swirling blanket of electronic haze, the constructs resembled upthrusts of jagged rock out of some bygone age or extraterrestrial landscape. Constellations of data extended to all sides thick as snowflakes in a blizzard. But the background—shot through with flashes of forking electricity—was neither the black of deep space nor the blinding pearl of a whiteout but a con
stantly shifting curtain of muted rainbow hues reminiscent of the aurora borealis, but utterly comfortless.
Many of the constructs appeared to be under construction and were girded by data scaffolds that made them look as foreboding as medieval battle fortresses.
None of that mattered, however.
As frequent flyer, gamer, and racer, Tech had visited an endless variety of virtual worlds and was not easily impressed. Anyone with a vivid imagination and a thorough knowledge of code could create an astounding environment. But it took a particular kind of genius to create a world that convinced a flyer he or she had entered a separate reality. It was like when you watched a horror movie. You had the option of letting yourself be frightened by the special effects or of pulling yourself out of your suspension of disbelief by turning away from the screen to remind yourself that you were actually in a theater. The same held true for the Virtual Network, where the illusion depended on your willingness to surrender to unreality and ignore that cyberspace was nothing more than an agreed on simulation. But even deep immersion flyers couldn't sustain the illusion indefinitely. Sooner or later you were bound to remember that you were not in a
real
place, but in a chair somewhere with a data visor strapped around your head.
What made this Peerless domain different was precisely the sense of
reality.
In some way he couldn't explain, Tech accepted that even the act of lifting his visor would not be enough to transport
him out of the place. It was like an unpleasant dream he wanted to awaken from but couldn't. One of those running in the sand and getting nowhere scenarios that could turn terrifying in an instant.
“Marz, can you locate us?” Harwood asked.
“Locate you how?” Marz said in agitation. “The monitor screen's showing that you haven't moved from the hatch!”
“Oh, but we have, my young friend. We're in some sort of new platform or domain with a completely alien architecture. You won't find this anywhere on the grid. We've found our way into a hidden level constructed by Peerless—though I can't imagine how they created this. This has to be what Cyrus wanted me to investigate.”
“But how can you be
off
the grid?” Marz asked incredulously.
Harwood didn't respond to the question. Instead he led Tech cautiously down, toward the nearest of the completed constructs, which pulsed with sallow light.
Reconfigured as an outsize guitar pick, Harwood's craft advanced slowly on the construct. Tech followed at a discreet distance.
“These look like gigantic storage constructs,” Harwood said after a long moment. “But that's only a guess.”
Tech felt the hairs on the back his neck stand up. “They're huge! Why would Peerless have need for so much storage?”
“More important, what sort of data is Peerless storing? And why would Peerless be secretly re
leasing software that's capable of accessing this domain? Unless, for some reason, they
want
hackers to find their way here.” He paused, then said, “Is our artillery up and running, Marz?”
“You bet.”
“Set power level at deletion.”
“That's a go.”
Harwood's craft continued its tedious advance on a ridge of crags that punched through the haze like petrified, otherworldly castles.
“Steady, Tech,” Harwood said.
Tech wrapped his right hand around the joystick's hair trigger and took a stuttering breath.
A black substance thick as octopus ink spilled from the crags and began to diffuse, as if underwater. Even with the audio all but muted, Tech could hear a kind of hideous squeal accompany the outpouring. As he watched, the blackness began to coalesce into the shapes of living things of gruesome aspect.
Tech, who had seen more horror films than anyone he knew, considered himself immune to visual depictions of evil—to the glowing eyes, gory masks, fang-filled mouths, and other clichés. But whatever this thing was, it was of a different order of evil, as much inside his mind as illuminating the inner face of the headset visor. There was no shutting his eyes to it; no telling himself that the special effects had been faked.
“It's the thing that attacked me in the EPA!” he said. “Scaum!”
Harwood threw his craft into a sudden bank and opened fire on the still coalescing shapes. Disabling
code, bundled into hyphens and disks, streaked forward. Struck full force, some of the shapes blew apart and disappeared, while others drifted down into the haze, as if stunned.
The capabilities of Harwood's artillery awed Tech, but he had little time to dwell on it. Spider-like monstrosities were beginning to ooze from the ragged projections of other constructs. Tech dispatched a storm of crippling code, shocking the closest of them into hibernation. But just as many evaded the disabling code and attacked.
“We're outnumbered,” Harwood said. “We need speed. Marz, enable Turbo seven point five. Get us moving!”
The words had scarcely left Harwood's mouth when Tech's cycle reared up and rocketed forward with an incredible burst of power.
“Wow!” Marz said through the headphones. “Every soft in the system is juiced!”
Tech could feel it. Invincible, he wove a slaloming path through his attackers then powered the cybercycle through a loop and fell in behind Harwood's craft, once more a guitar. Grave forces tugged at them, trying to corrupt the nitro boost Turbo had provided, but to no avail. Deploying chaff clouds and logic bombs for good measure, Harwood and Tech raced for the conduit that had deposited them in that alien realm, slashing directly through barriers and hastily strung capture nets as if they weren't there.
Disappearing into the conduit, they poured on the speed, ultimately barrelling through the hatch Harwood had discovered. With their short-lived
invulnerability already beginning to fade, they reemerged in the dungeon of Peerless Engineering's castle.
Metamorphosed into something serpentine and venomous, Scaum was waiting for them.
Tech's veins filled with ice, and cold sweat prickled his palms.
Normally, he had no phobias about snakes, spiders, heights, flight, night, or enclosed places. But somehow Scaum seemed capable of exciting those centers of the brain responsible for irrational fears, and Tech suddenly felt at the mercy of all of them.
He kept hoping that Marz would realize what was happening and bring them out, even if it meant executing graceless exits. But in place of Marz's voice, all Tech heard was Scaum's terrifying howl.
Then Harwood spoke.
“Tech, fly straight out of the castle. No matter what I do, fly straight out. Whatever Scaum is, it's too powerful to confront head on. But I suspect that it can be outwitted, and I know you're clever enough to do just that.”