Synners (16 page)

"Maybe that's all right where you come from," Dinshaw said glaring at someone, "but around here, we don't go trying to break people's faces." She glanced briefly in Clooney's direction. "Usually."

"I wasn't gonna break anybody's face." The edge in the voice hinted at a change of heart. Gabe finally focused on a medium-sized, solid-looking person dressed in what seemed to be odds and ends from the various closets of Rude Boys, mystics, and urban guerrillas. Had she slept in those clothes? It must have been a hell of a night. No wonder he'd gone down, he thought; even the dreadlocks looked mean.

The double doors to the Common Room whispered open. He couldn't remember hearing that before, when this woman had come in to punch his face. What had he done, anyway, and why wasn't anyone asking?

"What happened?" The doctor knelt in front of Gabe and held his chin between her fingers, looking into his eyes.

"That
person
hit him," Dinshaw said, pointing at the woman. "She just swung on him and knocked him down."

The doctor looked over her shoulder at the woman, leaning against the coffee machine with her arms folded. The fateful coffee machine, Gabe thought, feeling a sudden absurd urge to laugh.

"It was an accident," she said. "He stepped into the line of fire."

"Really." The doctor sounded amused. Gabe squinted against the light she was shining in his eyes. "Can you open your mouth?"

He managed to part his lips as she felt his jaw carefully. The strange woman moved a little closer, trying to see over the doctor's shoulder, and Gabe thought he saw her face soften a little with concern. She looked substantial enough to have taken that shot and possibly a bit more without as much trouble.

"No dislocation or break that I can feel," the doctor said, "but we'd better take your picture, in case there's a hairline fracture. And I'll give you some 'killers. That's gonna bother you for a while."

Clooney cleared his throat importantly. "Well, Gabe, do you think you can work on 'killers?"

Gabe wanted to give him a dirty look, but the doctor still had a firm grip on his chin. "Just local stuff, Clooney," she said, "transcutaneous patches. Don't worry your little head, nobody's going to get toxed on the job today."

"Quel fromage,"
said the stranger.

The doctor looked over her shoulder at her again. "You just said, 'What a cheese.'"

"I let it stand."

The double doors to the Common Room whispered open again, and Manny Rivera came in, looking slightly hurried and rumpled. He paused inside the entrance, forcing the doors to gape around him.

"So
this
is where it's all happening today," he said with false congeniality. Not real emotion but an incredible simulation, Gabe thought, suppressing the urge to laugh again. Manny looked around slowly, as if he were memorizing faces, before his gaze came to rest on him, where he was still sitting on the floor with the doctor holding his chin. The artificial friendliness in Manny's face faded as his eyebrows went up. "Is it physical?" he asked.

"Of
course
it's physical, just
look
at him." The stranger was glaring at Manny as if she wanted a piece of him, too. The crowd around Gabe melted away as everyone else in the room remembered there was someplace else to be. Manny moved away from the doors, releasing them briefly before they flapped open again for the mass emigration. Only the strange woman and the doctor remained where they were.

"It's nice to meet you at last," Manny said to the stranger when the room was empty. "You were always out when I visited EyeTraxx."

"Yah?" The woman tilted her head and frowned at him. "Which one are you, Chang or Rivera?"

The doctor got to her feet. "Downstairs for pictures before you do anything else today," she told Gabe firmly. "Pick up your patches after." She glanced at the woman again and deliberately walked in front of Manny on her way out.

Feeling ridiculous, Gabe pulled himself up on a nearby chair, started to sit, thought better of it, and simply stood, wondering if he could actually get out of the room without further exchange with Manny. But somehow it seemed unfair to leave the woman, whoever she was, to face Manny alone. Even if she had hit him.

Manny turned a mildly bewildered smile-frown on him. "And what happened to you?"

"I hurt my face," Gabe said through his swollen jaw. It came out sounding more like
I hate I fashe.

"Well." Manny's brow wrinkled with a show of concern. "I presume we're still on for lunch?"

"Shertainly," Gabe said, nodding quickly.

"Good. That's good." Manny gave the woman a sidelong glance and left, marching through the center of the double doors, which promptly flew open and closed behind him, as if they understood their role in terms of his authority.

Unsure of what else to do, Gabe tried to smile at the woman with the still-functioning half of his mouth, to show her there were no hard feelings, while he waited for her to say something like,
Sorry I hit you,
or You
would
have been within your rights to say something,
or even,
Does it hurt
much?

Instead, she turned away to pour coins into the nearest cold-drink machine and hit one of the buttons with the same fist she had used on him. A can rumbled down into the delivery well, and she picked it up, her fingers almost circling it entirely. She had big hands. No long red claws.

She paused and stared at him as if she were surprised he was still there.

"Why the fuck didn't you watch where you were going?"

Without waiting for an answer, she strode out of the Common Room, swinging around the left-hand door and giving it a shove as if it hadn't opened widely enough.

He knew trying to phone out was as futile as trying to walk out, but he'd had to make the attempt anyway. It was logged on the record of activity now, and Rivera would have something to say about it. But then, Rivera had probably been expecting it. The last surprise he'd given Rivera was the double cross; there wasn't going to be another one.

Keely shifted on the couch, putting a cushion under his knees and an extra pillow under his head. The corporate-issue mattress had been a little softer than what he was used to. So were the amenities; even the fresh-airscented clothes they'd left for him were as soft as a baby blanket.
Cush
was the word, except for the extra-hard stuff on the phone line.

With a little concentrated effort, he should have been able to get around that, but the key word there was
concentrated,
or to be more precise,
con
centration.
He just didn't have any. His mind was fogged over, in a very funny way. He felt alert enough, but his ambition was gone.

This was not exactly mysterious. Rivera had seen to it personally that he was fed and watered in this fancy stable, after he'd beefed up the watchdog program. The effects of whatever had been in the food or water or both would wear off eventually, certainly in time for the full overhaul of the security system Rivera had said he wanted. Along with a number of other things. Rivera was expecting plenty out of him. The only thing that really surprised him was that Rivera hadn't already had an in-house pet hacker to call his own.

But then, if he'd had, he wouldn't have needed to pay someone to crack EyeTraxx.

Keely looked over at the nine-screen dataline. The programs popping on and off barely registered with him. Occasionally he used the remote to turn up the sound on something that looked interesting, but everything took too much effort to follow. He wondered idly what Rivera had given him—mild Blank? Or just a garden-variety Thorazine derivative? Whatever it was, it was clever. He could think all he wanted, even dream up whole programs, but when he tried to do anything more complicated than press a button, the system failed. Not enough RAM, he thought with bitter amusement. Or too much RAM allotted to pure processing.

Jones was probably dead about it, dead several times over. Trying to
deal with it.
Because, as all therapy victims knew, il was not what happened, it was how you
dealt with it.
Thanks, brother, you're a big fucking help.

Not that he was going to win the Einstein Award for Smart Thinking himself. He wasn't sure which was more stupid— trying an end run around Rivera, or throwing in with him in the first place.

He'd sworn he wouldn't get involved with industrial espionage; in the past he'd turned down plenty of other offers from middle-management sharks looking for a way to turbo out of the corporate pack. But Rivera had interested him. Maybe because he'd been getting bored, or maybe because he'd felt the need to show Jones that B&E could be useful beyond personal gratification. Yah, play the big man for a dead man. The need to posture had gotten him more than he'd bargained for. Shit.

The fresh-air aroma from his shirt came up strong as he rolled over onto his side. Somehow he'd put disaster porn on the top-middle screen, and they were running the
Twenty-Five Worst Air Crashes
series. Pretty disgusting. He would change it as soon as he could muddle through a decision as to what to put on instead. Today was not his day for decisions. He hadn't been doing too well in that area lately anyway; his decision to hack Hall Galen Enterprises for Rivera had been the start of a sequence of bad career moves. So to speak.

Maybe if he'd known that Rivera had been Diversifications, he would have given him a hot dose of the Fish instead of service with a smile. But Rivera had been well shielded, communicating through an anonymous email-drop. They used the same one later to catch the data hacked out of HG.

Not an easy hack, but a pretty safe one, routed through a tangle of different nodes; in case HG detected anything, the cutoff would kick in on all the nodes simultaneously, frustrating even the swiftest trace-and-freeze. Of course, that had meant he couldn't access the data during the transfer, and Rivera was the only one with entry to the email-drop. Or so Rivera had thought. He had honored Rivera's request in letter but not in spirit, piggybacking a small catch-and-copy on the channel into the drop. If Rivera was stupid enough to think he would leave himself totally ignorant of what they were hacking, then Rivera deserved to get hacked himself, which was what he'd had in mind all along.

What the hell. The guy was a fucking thief, a pampered corporate thief who couldn't even do his own dirty work, and his mistake was trusting another thief. While his own mistake, Keely reflected ruefully, was believing that Rivera couldn't do
any
dirty work. And believing that everything Rivera said
wasn't
a fucking lie.
Yah, I'm after financial records; I want to
know if this company's teetering and what it would take to buy them out.
That was a good one, just because it was so typical. Or maybe it hadn't been a lie, maybe that had been all Rivera had thought he was going to get.

The socket stuff must have been the first shit to hit the Rivera fan, so to speak, which had probably made it that much easier for Rivera to be so openhanded. Bearer-chips waiting in this or that electronic teller. He'd spent the chips happily enough and bided his time until Rivera closed the E-mail drop, which would trigger the catch-and-copy to zap its contents directly and untraceably to him.

Rivera's final message containing the promised bonus had come just before the C&C. The bonus had turned out to be the specs for Sam's system.

When he'd decrypted the data and seen that wild little nano-thing you could make from an old insulin or endocrine pump, he'd had a mental blowout. He hated Diversifications from the bottom of his heart, them and their overpriced crap ripped from hacker designs, repackaged and foisted off on a gullible public as hot, new product. Like the Dodge-M program, a little facade the busy career person could stick on the electronic mailbox; made it look like you hadn't picked up your email when you already had— that was nothing more than a fooler loop, dumbed down enough so that it responded only to the E-mail system and called
dedicated
so the public would think of it as reliable instead of an idiot release of a smart program.

And then the C&C had come in and his blowout had become a meltdown. Sockets,
fucking brain sockets,
and he'd given it to Rivera on a silver platter in exchange for a set of specs Sam had given him for free. Rivera had had the benefit of that for fucking
weeks,
while he'd been sitting with his thumb up his ass figuring he was dealing with some CPA whose idea of porn was a stolen spreadsheet.

He'd begun to wonder then if Diversifications hadn't cooked up the nano-system just for hackers, as a decoy. Maybe there was a sleeping load in the specs, and as soon as you ran them on your system, the alarm went out. Which meant Sam could be in danger.

A fast Dr. Fish search routine had traced her to the Ozarks. He still didn't know how the Fish had done it, and there hadn't been time to find out. Apparently she was safe, though. Safer than he'd been.

The sleeping load in the copied files hadn't awakened until he'd zapped the stuff to the clinic, after he'd divided another copy between Sam and Fez. The clinic had been his final stupid brainstorm. Later he thought he must have gone over the edge, thinking how it would be a great case of giving Diversifications a taste of their own medicine, see how they'd like finding out some cheap feel-good clinic had beat them out just by modifying some already existing implants and making them over into sockets.

Sockets from a feel-good joint, not some antiseptic, respectable corp like Diversifications—the government would have had a ban on them before you could say, well,
feel-good.
Not a whole lot of profit opportunity there for Diversifications. Wow, Rivera, what a bad bounce.

He couldn't say what had made him decide to split another copy between Sam and Fez any more than he could have said what they would do with it once they got together and figured out what they had, but it had seemed like a good idea at the lime. Backup in case something went wrong.

And he'd still been sitting at his laptop feeling like he'd bitten the biter when the cops had popped his lock and taken him straight to Rivera for a deal. A new deal.