Death Match - Diane Duane [62]
She ignored him, got straight back into her workspace, and got back to work reviewing Caldera. Several hours passed, at the end of which her brain was buzzing with commands and obscure syntaxes that she had never thought she’d need any time soon.
But I need them now, she thought, getting up out of the Comfy Chair at last and picking up, from the floor beside the chair where she had left it, Mark’s shining green key.
She pulled down a window to check the schedule he had sent her of the maintenance schedule for the ISF server. Theoretically no one would be in there until tomorrow morning sometime—local time, anyway. That was the afternoon for her, since the server itself, and most of the techs who managed it, were on the West Coast. All the same, Catie was twitching as she held the key up. “Space?” she said.
“You’re gonna get in trou-bllle…you’re gonna get in trou-blle….” her workspace manager sang, sounding entirely too gleeful about it.
“Not nearly as much as Mark Gridley’s gonna be in when all this is over,” Catie said grimly. “He’s gonna wish the Sureté had kept him to play with. Listen, you, just open a door to get me into the ISF server. The specs for the gateway are all right here. Don’t deviate, or I’ll pull your wires out, tie them to the tree in the front yard, and chase you around it.”
“Uh,” said her workspace manager. An open gateway popped into existence in front of Catie. Through it she could see darkness, with green lines drawn through it, running away to eternity….
“Keep this open in case I need to leave in a hurry,” Catie said.
“I, for one, intend to disavow any knowledge of your actions,” said her workspace manager helpfully.
“You do that,” Catie said, and stepped through the doorway into the dark of the spat-volume server’s space.
She spent her first few minutes there just standing, looking around her, listening, for any sense or sign that anyone else might be here. But Catie heard nothing, saw nothing, but the Cartesian grid running off in its single plane into the empty darkness. Finally she lifted the key and pushed it into the darkness.
Obediently it cracked open before her to show her the keyhole. She turned it, and found herself, not standing in space this time, but floating inside the spat volume at the heart of the “space station.”
“Workspace manager…” Catie said.
“Listening, visitor.”
“Please show me the schematic of the server software that I viewed when I was last here.”
The image of the spat volume around her faded away, leaving her standing on the Descartean plane again. But this time the server’s software structure towered up in front of her once more, a skyscraper’s worth of code, all represented once more as squiggles and bright colors and straight lines and wavy lines and spheres, like a spaghettiand-meatball dinner with aspirations to architecture. Catie heaved a big sigh. “All right,” she said to herself, “time to start trying to figure this thing out….”
She sat down on the green-lined “floor” and considered where to begin.
Elsewhere, hidden away in the depths of virtuality in a dim blue-lit bar that might or might not have genuinely existed somewhere else, two men more thoroughly wrapped in shadows than ever sat on either side of one of the marble tables and studied it and their drinks, trying to avoid having to look at one another. Even here, wearing seemings, neither of them raised his voice above a whisper…though the anger in their whispers plainly indicated that both of them would have liked to shout.
“…They shouldn’t have scored at all! Next time—”
“Forget next time for the moment! We’re not done with last time. And they did score.” Darjan was glaring at Heming. “What do I have to do to get through to you how important this is? You need to have these routines correctly