Glasshouse - Charles Stross [150]
“Yes.” Janis nods. “I didn’t, though. You know what? I think the diffmerge must have scribbled over part of the CY load in your netlink.”
“No.” I step out of the assembler and carefully close the door. “It happened earlier. I heard it earlier”—I frown—“talking to Sam, after I got out of hospital. I mean, she heard it.”
“Curious.” She cocks her head to one side, a very Sanni-like gesture that looks totally out of place on the Janis I’ve gotten to know over the past few months. “Maybe if she—” Janis snaps her fingers. “They’ve repurposed CY, haven’t they? The bit we’re carrying around in here, it’s used for loading behavior scorefiles and such, but if Hanta’s been modifying it to work as a general-purpose boot loader . . .”
I shudder. The consequences are clear enough. The original Curious Yellow used humans as an infective vector, but only really ran inside A-gates that it had infected. A modified CY that can actually run and do useful stuff inside a host’s netlink, and which doesn’t trigger the detection patch, is a whole lot scarier. You can do things with it like—“The zombies?”
“Yes.” Janis looks as if she’s seen a ghost. “Are we still in the glasshouse? Or have they relocated us?”
“We’re still in the glasshouse,” I reassure her. It’s the first bit of good news I’ve been able to piece together so far. “MASucker Harvest Lore, if what she remembers seeing upstairs is anything to go by. I mean, we might have been on a different MASucker, but I thought you accounted for them all?”
“I think so.” She nods, increasingly animated. “So that locked area you found in City Hall”—when I was being Fiore—“is probably the only T-gate on-site. Right?”
“There are the short-range gates to the individual residences.” I shiver again: Getting into City Hall and out again without being identified was a matter of sheer brazen luck. Ten minutes later I’d have run into the real Fiore. “They’re definitely switched off a hub at City Hall; I found the conference suite they inducted us through. As I recall, on the Grateful for Duration the longjump T-gate was connected to the flight control deck by a direct short-range gate, but was itself stored in a heavily armored pod outside the main pressure hull, in case someone tried to throw a nuke through. So, if we assume they haven’t rebuilt the Harvest Lore in flight, there’s going to be a way to get to the longjump node from either City Hall or the cathedral, which is just over the road.”
“Right.” She nods. “So. If this is the Harvest Lore, we’re about two hundred years from next landfall. If we assume exponentiation at, say, five infants per family, there’s time for ten generations . . . right, they’re looking to breed up about twenty thousand unauthenticated human vectors. Hanta’s got time to implant netlinks in them all. So when we arrive, she can flood the network with this new population of carriers—”
“That’s not going to happen.” I smile, baring my teeth. “Never doubt that. They think they’ve got us trapped. But the right way to view it is, we can’t retreat.”
“You think we can take them on directly?” Sanni asks, and for a moment she’s entirely Janis—isolated, damaged, frightened.
“Watch me,” I tell her.
THE rest of the day passes uneventfully. I say goodbye to Janis and go home as usual. At least, that’s what it must look like to anyone who’s watching me. I’ve spent the past few hours in an absentminded reverie, rolling around irreconcilable memories and trying to work out where I stand. It’s most peculiar. On the one hand, I’ve got Reeve’s horror at finding Mick dead, her apprehensive fear that Janis might be “untrustworthy” and a hazard to the friendly and open Dr. Hanta. And on the other hand, I’ve got Robin’s experiences. Sneaking around City Hall on tiptoe, finding locked areas and avoiding Fiore by the skin of my teeth. Coming across Mick in the hospital, with Cass. Dropping in on Janis in the library, her initial guilty fear and the slowly growing conviction—on my part—that she wasn’t just a bystander but an ally. Recognition protocols and the shock of mutual recognition.