Death Match - Diane Duane [53]
Her own space suddenly dissolved away to darkness. A second or so later that darkness began to lift again, like a slow dawn, but though the ground under her feet, a dusty, pockmarked surface, began to pale, the “sky” did not.
A moment later Catie saw why. The sky was black, and full of stars that burned, unwinking, unhampered by any breath of atmosphere. The dusty, pale ground was more than just pockmarked. It was scattered with little chunks of rock, something porous and light-looking, like pumice, and the pockmarks weren’t just potholes, they were craters. The nearby ones were small, but there were bigger, walled ones further off—ancient impact craters, their insides impossible to see from where Catie stood, though here and there a “splash peak” from some ancient gout of lava caught in the act of recoalescing with its crater’s briefly molten bottom still stood up above the rim.
She looked around her, very impressed. Off to her left, nearly new, there was the Earth, a bright, blue-burning crescent, and ever so faintly its dark side, North America and the Pacific mostly, was lit by moonlight, the old Earth in the new Earth’s arms. Catie smiled slightly, and finished her turn.
There, off to one side, in the bottom of a crater about the size of a football field, stood a half-circle of white columns, in the fluted Doric style—Catie had done more than enough columns in her Appian Way piece, and knew Doric from Ionian when she saw it. Some of the columns were broken at their tops, and their capitals had fallen here and there. Other columns which should have completed the circle lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground like felled trees, shattered in their fall. In the middle of the circle, where the fluted remains of several columns lay across one another and left a little space, Mark Gridley was sitting on one column, as if on a bench, and leaning back against another. In the empty space before him a display window hung, and he was watching a football game.
Catie strolled over to him, raising dust, and stood by him for a moment, looking at the image. “Is this preseason,” she said, “or post?”
Mark snorted. “Who can tell anymore?” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Sorry I’ve been hard to find lately.”
“Don’t sweat it, Squirt, I’ve been busy, too.”
“So I hear.” He waved at the viewing window, and it went blank. “James Winters said you needed to talk to me about some things.”
“Yeah.” She sat down on another of the columns, making herself as comfortable as she could on the ridges. “At the moment, I need to know just what makes a ‘sealed’ server sealed.”
He grinned at her, an entirely happy look. “Want to break into one and find out firsthand?”
Catie had to sigh. “Mark, has anyone ever investigated whether you might possibly have some piracy in your background somewhere?”
“Might be, on the Thai side,” Mark said cheerfully. “There were some funny things going on in the Malay Straits late last century….”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“And my mom told me once that she was related to Grainne O’Malley….”
Who? But Catie refused to ask him if this relationship was a good thing. Once you got Mark started on some subjects, there was no stopping him.
“I’d prefer not to break in anywhere we’re not wanted,” Catie said. “Life is complicated enough at the moment. But I also need to talk to you about some structural issues.”
“That’s what Winters said,” said Mark. “So, shoot.”
“Well, first, the spatball servers. ‘Sealed’ how, exactly?”
“Triple-redundancy controls on access to the code,” Mark said. “And safe-deposit type security on the physical servers themselves—three-key access, with the highest officials in the organization