Spellcrash (25 page)

Its positioning told me a number of things. First, Virus-X was playing for control, not destruction. If it wanted to kill Necessity as a functioning system, it could already have done so.

Second, it knew it might be discovered and wanted to force any opposition to be very cautious.

Nobody who wished Necessity well would take a shot at this thing unless they were damn sure they’d get it right the first time. It also suggested that Virus-X wanted to be in a position to kick over the game board if it looked like it might lose. That last was more intuition, based on what I might do in its place, than deduction, but it felt right.

Once we’d finished a series of exquisitely careful loops around the place to get a feel for how Virus-X was tied into the surrounding codescape, we settled in for my least favorite part of the hacking-and-cracking routine: waiting and watching. What made it particularly difficult this time was that I didn’t dare delegate
any
of the watching and waiting to a set of autonomous programs.

Virus-X was nasty on a platter, and I wouldn’t trust anything less adaptable than me to watch it until I had a much better idea of the parameters of any potential active security.

That turned out to be a wise choice. After we’d been there about twenty-five minutes, Virus-X

moved. The timing was perfect, hitting just at the point in time where I could no longer maintain maximum wire-trigger awareness without having the top of my skull come off. It struck in the exact instant that I finally started to relax a little—like a gut punch coming at the end of an exhale. Bastard!

Virus-X went from apparently static to sprouting about ten thousand autonomous security bots in an instant. It looked like an exploding pincushion, with pinheads in every color of the spectrum.

Before any could hit us, Mel wrapped me in his tail and took off. We spent the next forty or fifty seconds dodging and jinking like a moth that’s accidentally flown into a bat convention. Several hundred probes came in our general direction, some moving straight, some spiraling, some making sudden random changes of direction, and all of them potentially deadly.

Nothing without a real brain and significant experience in avoiding getting caught or killed by nine kinds of lethal software could have avoided the onslaught. Even with that experience, there was a good deal of luck involved in keeping out of the way of the probes. Then, just as suddenly as the hail of hostile bots had begun, it stopped, and the whole thing went back to looking completely inert.

“That was gangs of fun,” Melchior panted, as we settled back into our little hideaway. “Good exercise.”

“There’s nobody here you need to look brave for, buddy. That scared the hell out of me, too.” He grinned. “Just trying to make a little lemonade.”

Time passed. Tightly wound nerves slowly relaxed. Nothing happened. More time passed. Virus-X sent a fresh round of revert commands off to the contested subsystem we’d tracked it from—

nothing for us to worry about. Relaxation turned into boredom and inattention after something on the order of an hour. Then, wham! Bot storm. Again, we managed to evade the bots, though only just. We returned to our lookout.

Time pas—Kablooie! This swarm came within a few minutes of the last, while we were still in the immediate postadrenaline crash. The thing was vicious.

But Melchior had finally begun to get a feel for the movements of the bots, and we were able to rely more on skill than luck in our evasive maneuvers. It was still an ugly game, but one I thought we could reliably win going forward.

“Hey, Mel, I’ve got a question for you,” I said, when we’d caught our breath again. “I’m thinking bot storms would make great cover for any number of other activities. Could you run a playback of the last one?”

“Sure, though it’s going to be pretty sketchy. I was kind of absorbed with the whole not-getting-hit-and-dying thing.”

He held one hand in the air and conjured a ball of light above it. Within the net he had no need to rely on the beam projectors built into the eyes and mouth of his physical self. Images formed in the ball. They were grainier than usual and prone to sudden turns and twists as Mel’s dodges changed the orientation of his primary sensors. Watching them, I got the sense of an overarching pattern to the whole thing but simply didn’t have enough data to really tease it out.

“I feel like there’s something important going on there,” I said after a second playback, “but this just isn’t enough for me to pinpoint it. Next time around, why don’t you let me drive while you focus on getting a better picture of the swarm.”

Mel nodded and shrank himself from giant anaconda proportions into something in the neighborhood of a garter snake. Next, I shifted into Raven form for maximum mobility, and he coiled himself around my ankle. Then we settled in to wait.

When the next round started, it was my turn to flit and float and flutter like a mad thing.

Actually, having seen what worked best for Melchior, it really wasn’t
that
crazy, just strenuous and nerve-wracking. Afterward, we went over the replay. Once. And again. And . . . There!

“Freeze it, Mel. Look here, here, and here.”

I touched three of the bots in Mel’s projection. Though it wasn’t something anyone would likely have spotted in the middle of playing Don’t Perforate Me with the swarm, there were subtle differences in the way the trio moved. Both in terms of a moment-to-moment motion and overall course.

“Unless I’m wrong, those bots are bound for an intersection maybe a subjective half mile farther out from Virus-X headquarters than our present location.” Mel expanded the scope of his projected sphere, and I poked a finger at a new spot. “Right about here.” More waiting and watching. Whoopee!

“What’s it doing?” Melchior asked.

“Good question,” I said as I reverted to my own shape.

We were a hell of a long way from where we’d started—well beyond the bounds of Necessity proper—in one of the mweb proxy servers housed in the Temple of Fate, if I was any judge of things, and that made me very nervous. It was an older system, which registered on my meatspaceoptimized senses as a series of interconnected tunnels of the sort one might find in a coal mine.

We’d followed a set of the atypical security bots to a point where they’d merged into one much larger piece of software, which had then led us here. The program, which looked rather like a huge plunger, was now doing something very strange while we watched from behind a large pillar. The thing had stuck itself to one wall of the codespace and started to pulse rapidly, looking for all the world like an invisible plumber trying to clear a really big clog.

Melchior let go of my ankle and flitted up to wrap around my shoulder. “It’s thumping out a binary signal of some sort, but not in any language I’ve ever heard.” After perhaps a minute of sending, the plunger collapsed in on itself and dissolved. Much sooner than I probably should have, I crossed to the area where it had been working. I found a very faint ring where the program had clung to the wall. I leaned in for a better look.

“Don’t touch it,” admonished Melchior. “You don’t know what it’s for.”

“And I’m not likely to ever find that out if I don’t check.” I put my hand in the exact center of the circle and felt the faintest crackle of magic. Harmless. I leaned my forehead against the stone to get a stronger read. It reminded me of nothing so much as the faded echoes of a long-dead faerie ring. But that didn’t make any sense. There was no way to open a faerie ring into any part of the mweb. The two magics were fundamentally incompatible. I’m very good with faerie rings, and I’d tried it more than once over the years. It simply couldn’t be done.

“What are you finding?” asked Melchior.

I told him, and he shook his head, too. “You’re right. Can’t be done. Can we give up and go home now? We’ve been at this for ten hours straight, and we haven’t gotten much further than Shara did.”

I tapped the edge of the circle. “This is important, Mel. I’m sure of it.” But I was getting tired, too, and this
really
didn’t make sense. I turned around and leaned against the stone within the circle, closing my eyes and hoping for inspiration.

“You realize,” said Melchior, “that this is the moment where something would have grabbed us and pulled us through the circle, or you would have triggered a secret panel, if life were a movie, the which depending on whether it’s a horror or a farce. Of course, that would also give us a direction to follow, so it wouldn’t be all bad.”

We waited silently for a good five minutes. Nothing happened. We were getting nowhere at the ongoing cost of who knows how much damage to the fragile stuff of reality. I sighed and gently began to knock the back of my head against the wall. We really needed a break.

Every time my head connected with the stone I got a little flash of whatever magic the circle held, incredibly faint but also steady rather than fading over time. Thump. Flash. Thump. Flash.

It
still
felt like a faerie ring, and that
still
didn’t make any sense. Thump. Flash. Thump. Flash.

Wait a second. Maybe it didn’t make sense because I was looking at it the wrong way. I turned back around to face the wall, putting both hands on the edge of the circle and leaning my forehead against its exact center.

“You got something, Boss?”

“It feels like a faerie ring.”

“We’ve already done that one,” he replied. “It’s not going to fly.”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “What would happen if you built a faerie ring, a really tiny one, into the surface of a CPU chip?”

Melchior frowned at me. “I imagine that it would allow very small things to move from the surface of the CPU to other faerie rings elsewhere and vice versa. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“How do you suppose that ring would feel to someone standing inside the processor? Virtually.

Say that you entered cyberspace and went to the exact place within the hardware where the ring was closest. Would there be some sort of resonance?”

“I have no idea,” said Melchior. “Do you think that might be what’s happening here, that there’s a physical faerie ring somewhere on the other side of the virtual wall of codespace? And that you’re somehow catching an echo of that?”

“It’s the only thing I can think of that would make sense of this feeling.”

“Hmm.” Melchior looked thoughtful. “That might also explain why the plunger thing had to come way out here to the network boonies.”

“What . . . Oh, right. Necessity’s world is as immune to ring-making as the mweb itself. Good point.” I pressed against the wall harder, setting the signature of the hypothetical ring in my memory. “Are you up for something risky and quite possibly stupid?”

“If I wasn’t, wouldn’t I have found other work by now? What’s the plan? Are you going to just cut a hole in the wall like you did back in the abacus room?”

“That’s not how I was thinking about tackling it, but I suppose it’s worth a try.” I tried to imagine the response of one of the Fates if she found me cutting my way into the mweb server room in the Temple of Fate. Not pretty, but hey, I could always claim I was just doing what Lachesis had ordered me to do and cementing the bonds between Necessity and Fate. Yeah,
that’d
fly with my ex-grandmother and her sisters.

I used the anger that thoughts of Fate brought with them to summon Occam from its other-dimensional home. Lifting my blade, I pictured myself opening a doorway into the space beyond the wall, fueled the image with anger, and made a deep, drawing cut. Nothing happened. I tried again. Same result. That was when I realized that I had no real idea where the other side of that wall might be in physical space, having never been allowed anywhere near the mweb servers, and that I needed to. Apparently, “just over there” wasn’t enough of a location marker when point A was in virtual space and point B was in reality.

“No can do, Mel.”

“It’s probably for the better,” he said. “I’d have to go and fetch my body before I could follow you, and you’d probably muck things up in the meantime.

I stuck my tongue out at him, then used a mental picture of Atropos to pump up the anger needed for a cut from cyberspace to the computer room where Melchior’s physical form lay. There, I waited for him to take the long way round while fending off incomprehensible questions from our pet spinnerette and fighting fatigue to stay on my feet. Once he rejoined me, fresh-squeezed thoughts of Hades provided the angry-juice necessary to open a gate from there on to Raven House.

Laginn was waiting on the rail when we stepped out into the tropical night. The hand pointed one admonishing finger in our direction in an unmistakable you-wait-right-there-young-man gesture, and dropped to the floor before scampering off tippie-fingered. He returned seconds later with Fenris—Kira had apparently returned to Cerberus.

Haemun trailed behind the wolf with—bless his soul—a tray of food and drink perched in his hands. It wasn’t until then that I realized how incredibly hungry I was. Normally, cyberspace takes it out of me mentally much more than physically since the body goes into something very close to suspended animation when the athame goes in. In this case, having actually been there in some as-yet-unexplained way, I’d burned calories, too. Lots of them. And I hadn’t had great reserves to begin with. I realized then that I felt damned wobbly in addition to deadly tired.

“What happened?” demanded Fenris.

I snagged a sandwich from Haemun, dropped into the nearest chair, and took several bites before mumbling, “Eat first, questions later.”

I lay in my bed and stared blearily at the ceiling while the room slowly revolved around me, and all without benefit of alcohol. The combination of complete exhaustion and insomnia is one that has become all too common since I became my own personal night-light—Ravirn 3.0, now with glow-in-the-dark eyes™. A sleep mask doesn’t help when the light that’s keeping you awake is inside your own head.

When we’d first headed back to Raven House around midnight, I’d kind of hoped to keep our stop there to a matter of minutes so that any trail through the faerie ring wouldn’t have time to grow cold. Foolish optimism, that. Hours later and not feeling a whit stronger or more rested, I knew there was no way I was going anywhere short of noon tomorrow—and that only if I somehow managed a solid ten hours’ sleep between now and then.