Shadowrun 01 - Never Deal With A Dragon (26 page)

"Then it's hopeless."

"Nay, I said not that. But you must be aware of the dangers you face before trying to deck without authorization into a system as dangerous as Renraku's. As to the tags, I can strip them from your chips if you but give them into my care."

"Permanently."

Dodger laughed. "I have no need for your chips, as my own are far superior. What call has a master of the Matrix for some neophyte's persona programs?"

Sam was excited. "Then you will help me get into the Raku system?"

"If your back door is good, yes. But to assay it now would be folly, for you have no experience in such endeavors and would be iced before you passed the access node. Running a mainframe undercover is a bit trickier than doing your salaryman duties, Sir Corp. You'll need practice."

"How do I start?"

"Ghost spoke truly of you. You do have courage." Dodger heaved himself off the bed and opened one of the cabinets. He took down a keyboard and cleared the power cords so that he could lay it down on the counter. He held out the datacord to Sam. "Here is an Allegiance Beta. As a cyberdeck it is antiquated, but it should perform adequately for a beginner like you, especially while you are under the guidance of a master. I'll give you the Matrix address code to a safe system. You can try running against it for a while and see what you can get out. The system is not very complicated, but it's got ice."

Sam, who had started to reach for the datacord, pulled his hand back at the mention of IC.

"Nothing dangerous," Dodger assured him. "But it will get you some experience. While you're doing that, I'll work on your chips."

Sam handed over his persona chips before snugging the plug from the Allegiance cyberdeck into his datajack. He watched as Dodger unpacked his own deck, a much more sophisticated model, and a microtronics tool kit from his backpack. The Elf had his work well under way before Sam had steeled himself to power up the Allegiance.

Several frustrating but increasingly successful bouts later, he jacked out. His head throbbed, but he was elated. He had finally managed to strip some information out of one of the system's datastores. Dodger had been right. There was a lot more to unauthorized decking than he had imagined. He massaged his temples and stretched.

"You have had some success?"

"Got a datafile."

"Very good for a first try, Sir Corp." The Elf's face showed concern. "But you should not have been taxed that badly."

"Don't worry about it. I always get headaches when I access the Matrix."

"Do you? How strange."

"Remember, you aren't really ready for this, so try not to get separated."

"I know and I will." The chromed head bobbed in agreement, mimicking the action of its controller. There was no real reason for the icon to do so. No program had been executed, no command given. The motion was an artifact of the consensual hallucination that allowed the Human mind to function in the alien space of the Matrix. "I appreciate this, Dodger."

"Your words will be proven true only if you perform as an astute and attentive student." Dodger winced inwardly. The professor would have laughed to hear him utter those words. Though his mentor had used a somewhat different phrasing, the intent was the same. Had the old Elf felt the same emotions that tugged at Dodger now? Fear that his student's nascent skill would be insufficient warred with the need to see him stand on his own. There was a very significant chance that Sam would fail disastrously on this run. And the blame would be Dodger's for not demanding that one last drill, driving home a procedure until it was reflex. Or it might be his failure to describe some seemingly obvious trick of the trade that would lead Sam to make a mistake and pay with his life or his sanity. If there were more time, Dodger could train him better, but time, even for an Elf, could be a more implacable foe than even the blackest of ice. There was no more time. Sam, ready or not, would wait no longer.

Anxious over his student's capabilities, Dodger could not let him face the Matrix alone. Not against the powerful, and almost certainly hostile, Renraku System. Even without the IC, Sam would be a fast meal for the rawest Raku deck-hound roving the system. Without Dodger's experience, Samuel Verner, neophyte decker of the shadows, was likely to get his brain fried.

Dodger led the way. Their path ran through the fiber lines to the antennae hidden on the upper floor of the mission, then by microwave uplink to a satellite nexus. They shunted through the regional telecom grid connections and were beamed down into Seattle. They zapped through the local telecom grid to hover in an exchange junction box on Wharf Ten. The business system they had invaded was a minor client of the Renraku Corporation. The arcology Matrix was only a single, well-guarded step away.

They did not experience their journey as such. To their Matrix-bound perceptions, they simply stepped out and away from their home systems and seconds later stood at the foot of an enormous pyramidal icon. Its deep, nonreflective black was marked with a disk of glowing blue that regularly pulsed out an expanding ring of bright neon. The wave grew until it met the edge of the construct and another wave was unleashed. The first continued to expand, vanishing when the planar surface could no longer contain it, leaving arc segments to grow until gobbled themselves by the more distant edges of the construct's surface.

"Bring up the masking utilities," Dodger instructed.

He keyed his own, knowing without needing to see that his normal icon, a small ebon child with a glittering silver cloak, had been overlain with a simulation of the standard Renraku corporate decker icon. Sam's Matrix imagery, having originally been one of those icons, underwent a less visible shift. The facial features blurred and smoothed as replicated corporate symbols and identification markings shimmered into existence.

The badges borne by Sam's icon were faintly smudged, darkened as though slightly burned. With more time, Dodger could have done better, but he had to settle for unregistered duplicates of Renraku access authorizations that were imperfect. Though not foolproof, their disguises should withstand casual scrutiny by ordinary anti-intruder programming.

" 'Tis time to see if your back door really opens our way into the castle."

"Dodger, I don't think I should let you see the code."

" 'Tis a place whose secret paths I have trodden before."

"But you got in by yourself then. I wasn't opening the door. I . . . well, it just doesn't seem right that I should. Even now. What if we're mistaken and Renraku has nothing to do with the killings? It would be wrong for me to give away this secret."

"Do as your conscience bids, Sir Corp."

"I just wanted you to understand."

"Shall we get on with it?"

"All right."

Sam's icon moved ahead. They floated upward until they hovered at one edge of the pyramid, about a third of the way to the apex. Sam placed his hand at the point where an arc racing along the edge had revealed a slight discoloration. Just before the next wave hit that point, Sam's icon swung between Dodger's and the point of contact with the pyramid. As the wave passed, the faint glimmer of an outline appeared in the surface of the Renraku construct.

Dodger opened his eyes. Usually there was nothing to watch while decking. His gaze drifted to where his companion's fingers tapped codewords into the Allegiance cyberdeck. Dodger's fingers tapped an identical sequence on his own Fairlight deck. When Sam's fingers ceased their frantic motion, Dodger's hit one more key and the sequence was locked into storage on his deck.

Part of the price
, he thought. The passgate was too valuable a piece of data to be denied him by Sam's scruples. He refocused his full attention on the Matrix.

They entered the Renraku complex into a backwater slave module that was overseer for a bank of elevators. Such a node should not have allowed access to the system but it was, after all, a back door. The appearance was that of a small guardroom. Its smooth walls flashed infrequently with light as the elevators went about their business. A samurai dozed in one corner of the imaginary room, his neon armor dull. Because the elevators only connected a small spread of floors in areas of minimum security, the guardian ice would normally be activated only in an alert.

The run suddenly looked a lot more feasible. If Renraku had really been in an uproar over a major tech theft, the entire system would be on alert. Even here, the guard would be awake to watch the physical elevators and to report intruders to security. Such a monitor assignment was usually considered superfluous in such an unimportant node, but the presence of guardian ice was an indication of the thoroughness of the Renraku Matrix. At least that was the most reasonable conclusion if one assumed that Matrix security didn't know about the back door. Dodger didn't think such ignorance likely. He certainly wouldn't want to bet his brain on it.

Though the guard was asleep and everything seemed peaceful, it might still be a trap. If their own programs weren't successfully hiding their identities, the countermeasure programming might be sophisticated enough to present a pacific image until the intruding deckers could be drawn so deep into the system that escape was impossible. Corporate deckers could already be jacking in to hunt them down, or a tracer might be back-tracking their signal to detect their physical location prior to targeting a strike team. Dodger hadn't survived years as a shadowrunning decker without caution. But he had some experience with this particular corporate Matrix and he found nothing to indicate that all was not as it seemed. Somewhat assured, he signaled Sam to press on.

Sam leading, they left the elevator control node and stepped out onto the ethereal pathways that connected the components fo the internal Matrix. In the infinite darkness, subsystems glowed like distant stars of arcane geometry, while pulses of data blazed comet-like across those subjective heavens. Before and behind them, their own path faded away, leaving them walking an insubstantial flare of light that came from nowhere and went to nowhere, until they reached the next node.

During the transit, Dodger noticed that Sam's icon limped. His brow furrowed as he tried to understand the phenomenon. He had seen nothing in the persona programming that indicated such a visual interpretation for the construct. Once the run was over, he would have to re-inspect the chips.

As the limping chrome mannikin led him through node after node, Dodger's confidence grew. He began to feel assured that there really was no alert. They had only encountered one roving corporate decker and Dodger's programs has masked them from him. If an alert were in progress, they wouldn't have gone three nodes without bumping into some deckhound. This might be an easy run after all.

Finally, they reached Sam's goal, a datastore for medical files on non-Human assets. When first told of it, Dodger had questioned the worth of such data to their quest. Would not personnel files, though harder to penetrate, be more useful in identifying whether the feathered serpent worked for Renraku? Sam had assured him that Renraku would classify a Dragon, even a sentient one, as an asset rather than an employee. The distinction was foolishness to Dodger, but then he wasn't Japanese like Renraku's directors. Orientals sometimes had different ideas about how the world worked. He'd seen enough of such skewed attitudes from Sally Tsung, and she was only half Oriental.

The walls of the datastore were aswirl with alphanumeric characters. Symbols flashed different colors and danced at varying speeds, the pattern complex and ever-shifting. The image represented the code systems locking the data away from unauthorized access. Sam's icon stood transfixed. "I think you'd better handle this. I might trip an alarm."

"Technomancy of the simplest sort. Keep watch."

Dodger's icon dropped its mask and an ebon hand flourished a matte gold case. Slim fingers snapped open the lid and delicately removed a tool. Kneeling before the flickering wall of alphanumerics as though before a lock, Dodger inserted the slim instrument into the flow. After a few minute adjustments, he selected another tool, slipping it into the flow to use with the first. A careful twist of the wrist and the symbols slowed, their color pulses becoming longer. Another twist, and they slowed further and further, until they froze.

"Which file, Sir Corp?"

"I need to scan them."

Sam's icon stepped to the wall and placed a hand on the seemingly solid light. The chromed head bowed as if in deep concentration and file names flickered briefly as a fairy fire fled across them. After a minute, the glow steadied and highlighted one of them. "That one."

The ebon boy nodded and adjusted the angles of his tools. The wall moved again, sequences rippling past until the chosen code lay under the position of his hands. He returned the tools to their case and it vanished under his cloak.

Dodger extended his hand into the wall. It disappeared into the light as if cut off at the wrist. After a moment, he withdrew it. He held a fat green book. Dodger flipped quickly through the pages. "No serpents."

Sam sighed.

Dodger tossed the book back through the wall and tapped twice on the glowing file code. The alphanumerics of the wall resumed their manic rush, but their clarity was reduced.

"Dodger, I think we'd better get out of here."

"What is it?"

"I don't know. I just think that we might be pushing our luck if we stay."

Dodger's suspicions were roused by Sam's sudden concern, an indication that he was withholding information. He reactivated his masking program. "Very well, but I'll lead. We shall move faster that way."

They did, indeed, move faster, retracing their route toward the exit, until Dodger pulled up suddenly. He gazed in shock at the walls of the node they had just entered. Vertical slabs of mirror reflected their icons to infinity. It was uncanny, unprecedented. What made it worse was that Dodger's reflection showed the jet outline of a boy crouched under a shimmering cloak and the markings of Sam's chromed mannikin were dark pittings in the smooth surface. Dodger felt uneasy. He had never encountered anything like this node in all his years of running the Matrix.