Fade to Black

18

"Two, come with me please."

Shank looked up. "Huh?"

"We're taking a ride."

The small group gathered in the bolthole's living room-Shank, Dok, Bandit, and Ansell Surikov-looked at her as if puzzled, but Piper didn't wait for anyone to ask more questions. She had her kevlar-insulated jacket, her deck, and an Ares Model 70 Lite Fire automatic should she need it, and she wasn't going to give herself a moment to back out. She took the stairs to the sublevel garage. A battered Volkswagen Superkombi waited there, die backup vehicle. Taking it out and leaving Dok and Bandit stranded here with Surikov would light Rico's short fuse, but that was too bad. Sometimes Piper also had to do what she had to do. She got into the van and waited. Shank came along in a couple of moments.

"What's tox?" he asked gruffly, cramming himself in behind the wheel.

"We're going to the jackzone."

"Not the fragging Stacks."

Piper nodded.

"Rico ain't gonna like this."

As if she needed to be reminded… "Please do not argue with me, Shank."

"You're making a datarun, right?"

"I have no choice."

Programs degraded, code was unraveled, secrets revealed. Fuchi I.E. had a corps of deckers who did little else but scan their cluster of mainframes for intruders, security flaws, and other weaknesses. System integrity specialists, they were called. By this time tomorrow night, the code Piper had gotten from Azrael might be useless. She had to use it now, and she couldn't risk making the run on Fuchi from their bolthole here in Rahway, Sector 13.

Technically, she shouldn't have probed the Fuchi cluster like she had earlier this evening. If she'd been traced, it would have been very bad. She had taken a calculated risk.

Shank started the van and got them through the fog and the dark and the swirling dust storms to Edgar Road. That took them straight into Sector 10, a place people called "the Stacks" because it was the heaviest commercial and industrial concentration in the Newark plex. There were also more telecom lines planted here than anywhere else in the plex, and traffic was intense. For deckers, this was the "jackzone" of choice. A crowded local telecommunications grid might confuse a pursuing corporate decker or some trace and burn IC just long enough for a datarunner to get clear. It also provided multiple opportunities for illegal taps. The few people who actually lived in the Stacks occupied small rooms crammed into the rear of commercial plants or in factory lofts.

Only a fool would live anywhere near the matrix address from which they started a run. That would be like requesting an armed assault from an organization like Daisaka Security.

Shank turned the van down Ripley Place. That was little more than a hundred meters from the New Jersey Transit yards and Port Elizabeth. The rumbling vibrations of trains and the stench from the port were as depressing as the litter-strewn roadway and grimy, decaying buildings running down either side of the street.

Down near the corner with Second Street stood a building with a ground-floor bar called Aulisio's Backroom. Shank parked the van at the curb, then followed Piper inside.

A narrow corridor led toward the back of the building and the dingy little "Backroom," which was filled with the usual collection of scuzboys and punks sporting the usual gutterpunk fashions. The slag behind the bar wore mirrorshades and a turban and only glanced at Piper and her heavily built companion as they moved past the end of the bar and through another door.

Two flights up, Piper put a wire-lead from her deck to the electronic lock on a door. The lock was jacked into a Sony cyberdeck on the other side of the door. Breaking the Sony's encryption program and the code locking the lock would take a mainframe comp skilled in large-number theory. Her Excalibur inserted an electron key that cycled the lock open in about three milliseconds.

And that was what it was really all about: keys. Another name for information. With information came power. Ignorance brought only misery and death. That was why the world's megacorps took such pains to educate their minions properly, and in the proper corporate creeds. To retain their stranglehold on the Earth's millions, they must keep their iron grip on all the information that mattered.

Piper grunted, and pushed through the door. The room beyond was small and bare. An old recliner sat near a Fujiki telecom. A sleeping bag and pillow lay along one wall. A garbage can overflowed with waste from a dozen or more Staffer Shack meals. Piper kept nothing important here because this place was expendable, and necessarily so.

Shank secured the door. Piper took a seat in the recliner and jacked in. She hesitated only a moment before initializing the cyberprog in her deck, just long enough to say, "If anything happens… tell jefe I was thinking of him. Only of him."

Shank grunted. "You sure this is a good idea?"

"There is no option."

Then she was sluicing down the datalines, slipping quietly from grid to grid under the guise of ordinary, low-priority E-mail. Taking the long way to the Manhattan telecommunications grid might cost her a little time, but she preferred to get there discreetly, unobserved, unnoticed. The moment the Black Towers of the Fuchi icon came into sight, she turned aside and entered a small white pyramid, just one of thousands on the Manhattan LTG.

The words "Village Plumbing" flashed in front of her eyes.

Then she was standing in a small electric-white room facing a sculptured dataline. The portal into the open line resembled an enormous skull with gaping jaws. Piper initialized the prog she'd gotten from Azrael. A chartreuse skateboard appeared on the floor before her. The board blazed with the logo: Echo Mirage Express. Her iconic self suddenly exchanged its kimono for boarder gear: helmet, gloves, elbow guards, knee guards, hi-top sneaks. A flashing red and yellow sign appeared before the skull portal to the dataline, reading, "This Way to Fuchi Hell."

She stepped on the board and shot through the skull portal. The skateboard accelerated like a jet, the dataline beyond whipped back and forth like a snake. Sheer velocity tore at her clothes and forced her to lean forward almost horizontally just to keep from being blown off the board.

Abruptly, the dataline ended, the board vanished, her kimono returned, and she was plunging into a gigantic cavern of gray metal shapes and glaring, harsh red light.

Fuchi Hell.

She ripped a cord from around her waist and hurled the weighted end up and around to her rear. The weight caught on something, a pipe. The cord stopped her fall with a jerk. She swung back and banged against a wall of metal, then just hung there, taking in her surroundings. It was like hanging over the abyss, looking into the heart of some industrial monstrosity. The air smelled of molten metal. Enormous furnaces throbbed somewhere far below. Pipes and conduits ran everywhere. Spectral lights flickered and flashed. All the scene needed to complete the hellish image were blazing fires and the moans and cries of tormented souls. Piper could hear those cries in her mind. They were the cries of the millions that corps like Fuchi doomed to miserable lives and wretched deaths.

Hand-over-hand, she pulled herself up, up, up to a gangway sided by a metal railing.

There, she discovered a huge iconic figure in a black hood and long robe with long, full sleeves. The figure arose from the gangway as if from out of a pool of liquid metal. The small red window in the figure's iconic chest winked in alternating sequence, in black, "Mysterious Stranger Smartframe. Beware."

"What do you know of Fuchi Hell?" the figure said.

Very mysterious. Piper resisted a sarcastic sneer, then considered the question, warily. "It's an echo. Like a mirage." '

"Reflecting greater realities."

"Apparently."

The Mysterious Stranger Smartframe nodded, and suddenly drew forth a sword more than two meters long, styled like a scimitar, and inscribed with mystical symbols in winking gold. "Follow."

"Lead."

The Stranger turned and led along the gangway, which led to an elevator, which shot up a thousand stories or more in just milliseconds. The elevator doors opened on a gleaming yellow room filled with row upon row of dataterms and dataterm operators extending off into infinity. "The Central Communications Node," said the Stranger. The elevator shot up another thousand stories. The doors opened on another room filled with rows of dataterms and operators, all orange. "The Central Management Information Node," said the Stranger. The elevator shot up further. Another room, this one red. "The Central Security Node."

Piper frowned. "You're showing me some of the most seriously secured nodes in the Fuchi cluster."

The Mysterious Stranger nodded. "You're welcome."