Storm Warning by Melissa Scott

Author:Melissa Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Cammie mixed in at the interface of the base party and the public party, confident that she was not being followed, and already a little ashamed of her spurt of temper. She knew she needed more evidence; that was what she was trying to find. But no one was willing to help her investigate. Even Val, who had taken his concerns about the lack of air cover to Chase and Varden, was now saying it wasn’t their job.

She let herself ease through the interface, careful not to trigger even the benign counters that kept track of visitors, and found herself back on the midway of the public party. The Gaia Sisters’ storm sim loomed in the distance, but by now it had attracted a sizable crowd and there was a wait to enter. And she still didn’t have any extra money in her bank account. No, what she should do was figure out some way to find out more about the refugees, though what she could find that Major Rountree hadn’t uncovered …

She stopped abruptly. Rountree would have checked the Vanguard records, the Polity servers, and whatever they’d been able to pry out of the Union systems, but Cammie knew as well as anyone that Polity Cybersecurity didn’t exactly have unlimited access to the opposing side. On the other hand, she still had connections in the shadow markets, people who dealt with both factions. Somebody there might be able to get information for her … for a price, of course, but she knew Polity Cybersecurity had an account for that. gen:LOCK would, too. And if not, there were still people out there who owed her favors. It might be time to call them in.

There were also ways into the shadow nets if you knew what to look for. She started down the midway, pretending to study the floating menus outside each of the Ethertainment sections, but in reality looking for a faint flash of blue from any apparently decorative icon. This section was swept clean, probably because it was the access point for De Soto Base, but as she passed the in-and-out, the air thickened slightly—not real thickness, of course, but her sense of the code beneath the imagery sharpened. Adcons swarmed here, swooping from avatar to avatar, and she pulled out the subroutine she’d written as “bug spray.” The next swarm slowed sharply and divided, two halves sweeping past without trying to flash their wares, to rejoin once they’d passed her, and swarm someone else’s avatar.

There were more hidden icons tucked into the scenery, though none of them had the particular shade of blue she was looking for. She recognized most of them: affinity group signposts for private spaces; clue codes for virtual live-action games, most of them faded; assorted traffic trackers, legitimate and less so; the trigger for a prince-in-need scambot lurking among some otherwise harmless advertainment. She paused long enough to reset the trigger so that it would fire at the next white hat who passed, and moved on.

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