Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [48]
‘Most of the comrades won’t be back for a couple of hours,’ Moh said. ‘Time we did some hacking and tracking. Want some coffee first?’
Janis laid a hand on the nearest rifle. ‘Kill for it,’ she said.
While Moh clattered about in the kitchen area Janis looked over the hardware until she found a telephone.
‘Can you put an untraceable call through from here?’ she asked.
Moh looked up, surprised for a moment, then waved a hand.
‘You’re in space now,’ he reminded her. ‘You can put an untraceable call through from anywhere you like.’
Janis called up her sponsors, whose number was an anonymous code without regional identification. Relieved to find herself talking to an answering-machine, she told it there had been an accident at the lab, that the damage was being repaired and that she was taking the opportunity for a few days off. She put the phone down before the answering-machine could question her, then contacted the university’s system to make the previous message true. It looked as if the raid and the fire had been logged as a single incident, an ordinary terrorist attack, and was being dealt with through the usual channels: insurance company informed, security-company penalty clauses invoked, a routine request to the Crown forces for retaliation (this would probably be granted in that a fraction of a payload they were going to drop anyway on some ANR mountain fastness would be registered as justified by it).
She raised a contract with the Collective for her personal protection, using money paid back under the penalty-clause provisions. The university’s system, she was relieved to see, had Moh’s little gang on its list of approved suppliers. Her unspecified sabbatical wasn’t a problem either. She had a backlog of unused leave for the past year: like most research scientists, she found the concept of time off from work a bit hard to grasp.
‘Through the back,’ Moh said, carrying two mugs of coffee and the gun past her as she rang off. The common areas of the house – the corridors and stairwells – had the look of a castle in which there had been many wild knights. Weapons on the walls; Chobham plate visible behind holes in the plaster. Suits of body armour stood or slumped in corners. Moh elbowed open the door of a room, chinned a light-switch and stood back to let her in. The room was small, smelled of scents and metal and sweat, and was crammed with VR equipment: simulator seats and suits, goggles and gauntlets. Moh cleared some space on a table, hauled up a pair of worn gimballed chairs.
‘Forgot something,’ Janis said. ‘The magic-memory molecules.’
‘Oh. Right.’
Moh brought in the cold-box of drug samples, plastered it with biohazard stickers and stuck it in the back of a fridge that hummed to itself out in one of the back corridors.
‘Sure it’s safe there?’
‘It better be,’ he said. ‘That’s where we keep the explosives.’
Moh watched the tension ease from Janis’s shoulders and neck as she sipped her coffee, ignored the tiny wrinkles of irritation on her nose as he lit another cigarette. She was taking this well, if finding herself inside a small fortress of communist mercenaries gave her a sense of security.
She looked at him through narrowed eyes.
‘How’s your head?’
He inhaled and leaned back. Suck in and hold your breath and dive down into that limpid depth…it gave him a way in, an entry code.
‘Strange,’ he said, exhaling as if he’d just happened to remember how. ‘But OK, I think. Think is what I do.’
She seemed to take this as data.
‘You could try mainframing again.’ Wicked smile.
‘I don’t even want to