Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [32]
The system clock came alive again and spun through a highspeed blur of digits, recapping the time since the Apollo had gone down. The rectangles of the hard disks and the boxes of the mainframes reappeared in the top left of the screen, still coloured white, still wide open. Her active folders popped back up, one by one, reopening for her at the exact line in the exact page where she’d been reading when the system went down.
Stephanie stared and then moved the cursor on the screen.
It jerked around crazily but that was because her hand was trembling so badly. She clicked utilities on and off, ran a quick systems status check, examined the network.
There was no sign that she’d rung any bells. The system security was asleep. No one else was logged on. The network was quiet.
The Ferret’s status screen had come up.
Systems failure it said.
Nine documents left to import.
Continue Or Quit?
Stephanie hesitated for a tenth of a second.
She moved the mouse and clicked on Continue.
New folders began to pop up on her screen as the Ferret dragged them back across the network. Stephanie thought about saving each one to floppy and then getting the hell out of the office. She thought about her promises to God.
But that wasn’t the way to succeed in this life. If you didn’t take the chances you didn’t get the rewards. She’d stay and read each document as the Ferret decrypted them, exactly as she intended. It didn’t do to let yourself get spooked. That wasn’t the way to end up on the board of the Butler Institute. Maybe she should even send the Ferret out again, after she’d done a little reading, with a new set of specifications.
The miniature cartoon ferrets were coming back, scurrying out of the hard disk and mainframe icons. They grew as they ran, and merged together. Halfway in the journey back across the screen they’d coalesced into the original single big Ferret. He stopped and winked a cartoon wink at Stephanie, preening his whiskers.
He was still preening them when the green thing hit him.
It came out of the network through the hard disk icons, following the Ferret’s route. It lashed down across the screen in a hot green slash of pixels, shedding a radiant series of afterimages behind it like glowing empty skins. The Ferret was just beginning to react to its presence. The Ferret sensed the arrival of security software and tried to hide. Its whiskers twitched as it began to respond. The menus and software badge vanished. The Ferret faded into a ghost image and the disguise of the syringe‐shaped trademark began to appear in its place. But the green thing came crashing down on to the vanishing Ferret’s shoulders and locked on with a grip of death. The syringe popped out of sight and the Ferret’s colours came up bright and clear again. It tried to strike back but the green thing was sprouting long claws now.
It lunged and slashed and the Ferret went down.
‘Good, isn’t he?’ said a voice.
Stephanie had once given herself a week of whiplash pain in her Honda by hitting the brakes when she’d had the headrest removed. It was nothing compared to what she did to her neck now, snapping her head backwards to try to look over the back of her chair. But before her eyes registered anything she’d already caught the smell.
A smell like lavender.
Lavender and something else, a scent of herbs.
Mulwray nodded towards the screen where the green scaly thing was tearing into the Ferret, lacerating it with red streaked claws. ‘That’s the Ferret Killer.’
Mulwray leaned forward from where he was standing behind her chair. Stephanie had to twist away so that his arm didn’t touch her face. The smell of him was very strong, very close. He touched the sound‐level controls on her computer. The death squeals of the Ferret rang through the office as the green thing disembowelled it. Brilliant pixel viscera sprayed across the screen, the torn body of the Ferret beginning to lose smoothness and decompose into an angular outline as its graphics controls went.
* * *
‘Ever looked at this before?’ Mulwray was standing hunched over the coffee