Trouble and her Friends Read online

  *I’m looking for Trouble,* Cerise says, and waits.

  She gets no answer, Miss Kitty’s icon stands still and silent, and Cerise frowns and takes a step forward. And then she smells it, the scent of rotten meat, the corpse-smell the brainworm uses to signal absolute disaster. Even as she turns to run, the walls fold inward, IC(E) spiking downward. She feels its cold driving at her, lifts a hand to ward off the nearest spine, and its jagged tip scores a deep line along her arm. The brainworm reflects its touch as searing pain and the thin trace of blood ghostly along her icon-arm. There’s no reason for this attack, she’s no danger to Miss Kitty, never has been, has been in fact a good supplier, but there’s no time to form a protest. No time even to reach for an icebreaker, or any of the other programs she carries in her toolkit; this is serious IC(E), deadly serious, and she closes her hand convulsively, triggering the safety. The world dissolves around her, the spikes of the IC(E) fading to static as they touch her skin

  and she leaned back in her chair, untangling her fingers from the cord of the safety. The screen in front of her flashed a bright-red icon, and a text message below it: SESSION ABORT. She glared at that—it was an admission of defeat to trigger to the safety, to run away from danger—and then, belatedly, became aware of the faint scent of hot metal rising from the linked machines. She frowned then, and touched the brainbox. The casing was warm, warmer than it should have been. Her frown deepened, and she set the safety aside, touched keys to call up a diagnostic program. The session-abort icon vanished, replaced by a spinning clock-face; a moment later, it, too, disappeared, and the program presented her with a list of the various components and their conditions. Two of the five fuses had tripped in the brainbox, and one had gone in the biotranslator as well. Cerise shivered, even though she’d expected it, and reached for her box of spares. Miss Kitty’s IC(E) had been set to kill—and what the hell the woman thought she was doing, Cerise added silently, transmuting fear to anger, I don’t know. The whole net’s gone crazy—they must have, if anybody’s actually supporting Evans-Tindale. And if Miss Kitty tried to kill me. Though that probably wasn’t personal. She closed her eyes for an instant, remembering the frozen icon and the sudden smell of death. No, probably not personal at all, she decided. If I were abandoning a grey-market space—and I think she must’ve done just that—that’s the way I’d play it. A striking icon to catch people’s attention, and then hair-trigger IC(E) to go after whoever tried to follow me. Or, like Miss Kitty did, whoever showed up first.

  She rubbed her arm where the IC(E) had touched her—there were no marks on her skin, just the tingling reminder of a near miss in her nerves—and then began methodically to shut down the system. She couldn’t replace the fuses with the machines running, and she couldn’t go back out onto the nets until the fuses were replaced: no choice, she thought, and swung away from the system. The media wall was still talking at her, the screen now showing a panel of suits discussing the implications of the change. She scowled at them, worked the remote to mute the sound, and only then recognized one of the suited figures as George Aferiat, who had written software for the first dollie-slots and their associated implants, and who had also run a shadow space in the BBS before he’d gotten law. There was nothing more zealous than a convert. She lifted her middle finger to the screen, and turned back to the message board.

  It didn’t take a lot of work to retrieve Carlie’s message from the trash—even cheap machines had the option these days, and her system was far from cheap. She glanced at the linked machines—everything was shut down and saved; all she had to do was wait for the chips to cool and trigger the playback. Carlie Held’s voice poured from the little speaker, as perfect as though he himself stood beside her.

  “Cerise, Trouble, if either of you’s there, pick up, we’re in deep shit.” There was a pause, and Cerise pictured him standing in the tiny office that served his storefront surgery, the privacy handset swamped in his huge hand. “OK, you’re not there. OK. If you haven’t heard, Evans-Tindale passed—goddamn Congress overrode the veto—which means the worm stays illegal, and Treasury gets to make the law on the nets. I need to talk to you—we all need to talk. Call me as soon as you can.”

  Cerise heard the click of the connection breaking, and a red light flashed on the tiny status screen: end of message. She swore under her breath, and reached for her own handset, touched the codes that would connect her with Carlie’s surgery. She heard the beeps as the system routed her call—a local, twelve sharp musical tones, seven for location, three for payment, two for privacy—and then waited as the ring pulsed in her ear. She counted six, and knew Carlie wasn’t answering—wasn’t there—but let it ring a dozen more times, staring at the posturing suits in the media screen, before she finally hung up. Carlie was gone, too.

  And that was ridiculous, she told herself. She jabbed buttons again, punching in another number—Arabesque, Rachelle Sirvain in the real world: another local call, just in the next ward, five minutes away by the subway. The phone rang, rang again; she counted ten before she hung up, fighting sudden panic. It was almost as if she was the last one of them left, the last survivor—She shoved that thought away, and punched a third number. This time, the answering machine picked up on the third ring.

  “Hi, you’ve reached five-five—”

  Cerise broke the connection—Dewildah was gone, too—and punched a final set of codes. In the media screen, the talking suits had disappeared, to be replaced by a head, a serious-looking woman who wore secretarial goggles. The phone rang, rang again, and then a sharply accented voice said, “Hello?”

  Cerise let out breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Butch. Thank God you’re home.”

  “Cerise? Are you all right?”

  She could hear the concern in Butch van Liesvelt’s voice, and managed a shaky smile. “Yeah—well, no, Trouble’s gone and there’s all this with Evans-Tindale—”

  “Yeah.” There was a little pause, and Cerise could hear in the background the indistinct sounds of someone talking—television, probably, she thought. In the screen, the image changed again, became a pair of lists showing the differences between the Amsterdam Conventions and Evans-Tindale. In one corner of the screen, a much smaller talking head—male this time—babbled away, mouth moving without sound.

  “Look,” van Liesvelt said abruptly, “I’m heading over to Marco Polo’s. Carlie called from there, he said he and Max were there already, and that Arabesque was on her way. I was just going to call you and Trouble, I talked to Dewildah already—”

  “Trouble’s gone,” Cerise said again.

  “Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

  “I mean she’s gone. She packed up her stuff and left, I don’t know where she is.” Cerise took another deep breath, fought back the baffled anger. “Or why, exactly, but I think I can guess. I’ll meet you at Marco Polo’s. We can talk there.”

  “You sure?” van Liesvelt asked, and Cerise felt her eyes fill up with tears. Of all their odd-ball group—a half-dozen or so crackers who had dared both the brainworm and the risks of real-world contact—it was van Liesvelt, shambling, physically graceless Butch, who’d done the most to take care of all of them.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll see you at Marco Polo’s.”

  She cut the connection before van Liesvelt could ask anything more. She set the handset back on its hook, taking ridiculous care with the placement, waiting until the tears were gone again before she turned her mind to business. She worked the remote again, shutting down the media wall, and grabbed her leather coat off the hook by the door before she could change her mind.

  The wind had risen since the afternoon, curled in as she opened the door, bringing the smell of the wet streets and driving a handful of tattered leaves around her ankles. Cerise shivered, tucking her chin down into the coat’s high collar, then had to reach back to pull the door shut behind her. She jammed her hands into her pockets, wishing she’d remembered gloves, and tore the lining again where she’
d cut the pocket for a borrowed gun. This wasn’t a particularly bad part of town, no more than most, and better than some, but there had been times when she needed a gun’s threat to balance the odds. Or to get them out of whatever Trouble had talked them into. It hadn’t happened often—Trouble was generally reasonable, cautious—but every now and then she’d accept a challenge, even one that hadn’t been meant, and they would all have to live with the consequences. Like now.

  Cerise shook the thought away, the memory of Trouble furious and confident, facing down a pair of local boys with knives. She had downplayed it later, always pointed out that the kids had been maybe thirteen, fourteen years old and obviously trying their first mugging. But Cerise had never forgotten the crazy grin, the sheer, black-hearted determination, and had been, herself, more than a little afraid. She had caught the look again four months ago, when Evans-Tindale passed the first time, and had done her best not to see it. Trouble had said then that she was quitting, that they couldn’t go on if the bill passed, and she had obviously meant it.

  It was almost dark out now, and all the streetlights were on, swaying gently in the cold wind. Cerise shrugged herself deeper into her heavy coat, stepping more quickly across the moving shadows, heading for the nearest subway station at the corner of Elm and Cass. Not that it was all that far to Marco Polo’s, less than a dozen blocks, but it was cold, and dark already, and the secretary gangs, the dollie-girls, tended to lurk on the fringes of New Century Square. As she came out into the brighter light of the intersection, however, she saw the lines waiting beyond the ticket booths, men and women huddled into drab, windproof coats, here and there the brighter cloth of a student uniform, and she muttered a curse under her breath. The system was backed up again—it had never been built to handle the current loads—and she could easily walk to the Square before she even made it down onto the platform. She lengthened her step, heading up Cass into the teeth of the wind.

  Once she had passed the intersection, with its bright lights and the low-standing brick station, foot traffic thinned out. This was mostly small shops and offices, all of which closed promptly at five to let their people get out of the city-center before full dark, and the doors and ground-floor windows were barred, steel shutters or heavy grills drawn tight over their vulnerabilities. Security lights showed like blue pinpoints in the corners of a few windows, and there were metal mesh sleeves across the swaying streetlights, casting webbed shadows over the pooled light. A few of the lights were broken anyway, leaving patches of greater dark, and she crossed them warily, wondering if she’d been stupid after all. But she was already past the bus lines at Stadium Road—not that they were running, it wasn’t a game night—and it would take longer to walk back to the station than it would to keep going. She could see the lights of the Square in the distance, the haze of gold neon bright at the end of the street, the gold-and-red bars of the Camberwell Beer sign just visible between a pair of buildings: only another four or five blocks to go, and she’d be in the relative safety of the crowded Square. She kept walking, not hurrying, glad of her soft-soled shoes and the dark coat that helped her pass unobserved, and reached the end of Cass without encountering another pedestrian.

  New Century Square was as busy as ever, lights glaring from the subway kiosk at the center of the circle, more light, red and gold and green neon, flashing from the signs and display boards that ringed the Square, and from the signs that glowed and flickered over the myriad doorways. The gaudy lights helped to disguise buildings that hadn’t been new eighty years ago, when the century turned and the Square had been rechristened in hopes of attracting a new clientele for the new years. Maybe half a dozen suits were standing outside the station, staring up at the news board and its displays—currently a pretty dark-skinned actress showing teeth and tits and a new shampoo. There were more suits inside the ticket booths, men and women alike looking tired and irritable, and Cerise guessed that the system still wasn’t running properly. A handful of dollie-girls were hanging out under the awning outside the discount store, watching the suits. The youngest looked twelve or so, the oldest maybe sixteen, and each of them wore a parody of a corporate suit—the skirts too short, slit thigh-high, the jackets too tight and sexy, their faces layered with clown-bright makeup. Their shoes, bright neon-satin pumps, had three- and four-inch heels sheathed in steel, and there would be flip-knives and maybe a gun or two in the sequinned handbags. They belonged to the secretarial so-called college over on Market Street, Cerise knew, kids who had indentured themselves to the school and its placement service to get the implants, dollie-box and dollie-slot, that could eventually win them a decent job with a corporation. They had found out too late, they always found out too late, that they didn’t automatically get the training or the bioware that would let them walk the nets, or even use the systems to their full capacity. It was no wonder they took to the streets to get a little of their own back. She had been one of them, eight years ago, before she’d figured out how to get into the BBS and found the grey-market dealers there, and she gave them a wide berth, knowing what they, what she, were capable of doing. She was aware of their stares as she passed, the anger buried under the troweled-on color, and ignored it, knowing better than to meet someone’s eyes and trigger a confrontation. Trouble would have laughed—if she was in one of her difficult moods, she would have said something, anything, earned her name yet again. But then, Trouble had somehow never learned to lose. How she’d managed that, Cerise didn’t know, even after four years together working the nets, and three years as lovers: she wasn’t corporate, and besides, the corporations taught you early to lose to them. But she sure wasn’t city-trash, either.

  She heard the click of heels behind her, steel on stone, and then a second set of footsteps, the same sharp almost musical clink not quite in synch with the first, and did not turn. The wall of a store rose to her right, solid brick banded with neon: no place to run, except into the street and the traffic, and that would mean losing anyway. The skin between her shoulder blades tingled, an electric touch at the center of her spine. She had played the game before, knew exactly what was happening, and then she heard the voices, rising shrill to be certain she, and all the others, heard.

  “—that hair.”

  “Pull it out, girl.”

  Cerise turned then, the fury rising in her, caught the dollie-girl by the lapel of her too-tight jacket, swung her sideways into the brick of the wall. The girl staggered, losing her balance on the high heels, and Cerise hauled her up bodily, using both lapels this time, and slammed her back against the bricks, narrowing missing a light tube. She caught a glimpse of the second girl, mouth open in shock, falling back a step or two at the sheer craziness, and looked down at the girl in her hands. She hung dazed, one button torn loose, her eyes unfocused and filled with reflex tears. Cerise shook her, not caring that her head bounced off the bricks, felt her scrabble without result for safer footing.

  “You touch me,” Cerise said, “and I’ll fucking kill you.”

  She hadn’t spoken loudly, sounded calmer than she felt, but the girl heard, eyes widening so that a tear ran down her painted face, drawing a long line of scarlet from her mascara. Cerise lifted her, barely feeling the effort, and let her go again, saw her slide gracelessly to the bottom of the wall and sit for an instant, long legs sprawling, before the other girl moved to help her up. Cerise turned her back on them, not caring, daring them, even, to follow her. There was nothing, not even a catcall, last defiance, and she felt the sharp sting of regret before the reaction set in.

  She was still shaking a little, adrenaline-anger and fear mixed, when she turned down the narrow street that led to Marco Polo’s and pushed open the door badged with a neon cactus and pagodas, wincing as the twanging steel-string music hit her like a blow. The downstairs room was filled with a mix of suits and lower-level tech-types and a fair number of secretaries and temps of both sexes on the hustle. Most of them were standing four-deep at the bar, bellowing indistinguishable orders
at the sweating bartenders, or crowded in groups of six or seven around the tiny tables. A few, maybe a dozen or so, were already on the little dance floor, arms linked across each others’ shoulders, feet moving in approximate coordination. Twin television monitors hung at the ends of the bar, and the news anchor beamed down like a benevolent deity. His words were inaudible through the music and the shouted conversations, but the logo beside his head was the familiar computer-chip-and-gavel that had come to stand for Evans-Tindale. Cerise made a face, seeing that, and began to work her way through the crowd toward the stairs that led to the upper bar.

  It was a jovial crowd, this early, everybody loose but not yet drunk enough to think of trouble, and it wasn’t difficult to get through the mob, no need to resort to elbows or stepping on toes. She smiled mechanically at suits, and they edged smiling away, letting her worm through the spaces. She fetched up at the foot of the stairs in a sudden pocket of silence as the song ended, and stood there for a moment catching her breath, looking back toward the monitors. The Evans-Tindale logo was still in place, though the image behind it had changed: the screen was filled with protesters, all waving placards that called for the U.S. to sign the Amsterdam Conventions. The camera focused on one sign, carried by a black woman who looked young and serious enough to be a student at a real college; it read, in bright red letters, A: U.S. and Liberia. Q: Who Hasn’t Signed? That wasn’t quite true, Cerise thought—she vaguely remembered that there were a couple of Asian nations that hadn’t yet agreed to the Conventions—but it was close enough. At her side, a tallish suit, good-looking, broad bones and a not-too-neat mustache, shook his head.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, to no one in particular. “What’s the problem?”