Profiteer

Hell, if she had been carrying some antimatter grenades and the bottles went, they could probably say good-bye to the whole building. AM was a sneak weapon, no one was fool enough to carry it into open combat where a stray shot or EM pulse could turn you into a two-hundred-meter crater. Terrorists liked them because they were small and you couldn’t really detect one—except when they malfunctioned.

 

Whether it was the AM threat, or Zanzibar behind her taking potshots with a plasma rifle, the door slid open for her. She piled inside, pushing aside a pale straw-haired guy who couldn’t be any older than she was. He stammered, “L-look I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t want any trouble here. The company is going to—”

 

“The company’s going to hang you, boy, for letting that marine geek up there.”

 

“I had nothing to do—”

 

“Shut up.”

 

Tetsami made her way down the length of the trailer. One end was dominated by a control center. The walls were alive with screens showing the POV of various robot workers. There was a massive computer board, displays showing elevations of the structure being built, blinking lights—a lot of fire warnings, Tetsami noted—a comm tap into the wider computer net, and—just what Tetsami was looking for—a bio-interface jack.

 

She pulled a small optical cable out of her pocket and checked the connections. They matched.

 

“Hey, you can’t—”

 

“Don’t fuck with me, Blondie, or I’ll slice your balls off and jam them up your nose.”

 

Blondie shut up.

 

She made the connection into the jack and made sure the terminal was slaved to it. Then she took a few breaths to calm herself, and held the rounded end of the cable to the concavity in the skin at the base of her neck.

 

The magnetic end of the cable went home with a click audible through the bones of her skull. It took a fraction of a second for software and hardware to engage each other. It always seemed an eternity to her. She knew that it was her time sense telescoping, even before the hardwired interface programming got up to running speed. In a sense, her brain had been hardwired for the job even before she’d been born.

 

Time stretched into infinity. Her senses shut down. She fell into the bio-interface’s shell programming. First there was a solid blue infinity, white noise, the smell of oranges, the feeling of pins and needles washing over her body. Then there was a jerk as the bio-interface’s reality fell into place and gave her back the senses it didn’t want.

 

It kept her vision and filled her point of view with a fairly pedestrian field full of control options: cubes labeled with icons, sliding over the same blue background. Her hearing dropped back to the real world, and she could hear Blondie’s breathing. It sounded much too slow to her, as her time sense of the virtual world sped up way ahead of realtime. Kinesthetic and tactile senses dropped out too, except for her right hand, which apparently was the control surface.

 

The setup was primitive as hell, and buggy, too—she still smelled oranges.

 

Since the terminal software had given up her skin, she could feel a smile stab her cheeks.

 

Tetsami began walking through the software. Three levels into the surveillance option, she found out that the oranges weren’t a bug. She tripped something, and the orange smell turned rotten and became a putrid stab through her forebrain. A security measure that would have knocked her out of the shell program if she weren’t a pro.

 

She had barely noticed the smell change when she’d already started an internal dialogue with the hardware in her skull. She had cut out the olfactory I/O before the odor became crippling.

 

Should have done that earlier. Should have known the oranges weren’t an artifact.

 

Didn’t matter. Most folks couldn’t cut out a slaved sense on the fly without losing the contact, but she had, so no harm done.

 

Since she was on a priority terminal for the construction computers, she didn’t run afoul of any more stringent security. Most of the access-denied stuff was straddling external inputs. In less than three seconds she had cubes up showing windows on the construction scene.

 

She scanned the views as fast as she could, looking at the world through the eyes of dozens of robots. At one point, she heard Blondie’s breathing change tempo and come closer. She yelled, “Don’teventhinkit”

 

She didn’t know if he understood what she said at the speed she was operating, but it sounded as though he stopped moving.

 

Lock.

 

She found what she was looking for. She had the view from the northeast crane. The other views scrolled until she found cameras with views she wanted. A view looking at the armored marine on the roof of the building to the north, one looking at the sniper halfway up and in the corner of the eastern building, and another of the guy firing on the van from the tenth floor of the construction.

 

Now to hack the operations software.