Geraint wasn’t much given to the political intrigues so favored by Britain’s nobility. Supporting one faction inevitably meant that some other little clique would invariably harbor a grudge, and so he tried to avoid taking sides. When his hand was forced, he went along with the majority and never opposed the truly powerful. All he could do was hope that Rhiannon Glendower wouldn’t single him out from among the parliamentary lobby the government would need to muster for this vote. She was the last person he’d want for an enemy.
Almost dreamily he turned and twisted the tiny Chinese dragon spheres. The spheres tinkled and jingled in his fingers, and soon he had them synchronized in their gentle chiming. It was only when his senses suddenly snapped him back into the real world a few minutes later that he realized how far away he’d been, off in one of the fugue states he’d inherited from his mother, who possessed the Sight far more strongly than did Geraint. He couldn’t recall anything from his moments out of this world, just a vague premonition and uncertainty. Almost reluctantly, he reached for the Tarot and drew a single card.
The Five of Wands. Strife.
He felt unsure about the card, and despite his intimate familiarity with the images, he pulled a well-thumbed old book from an untidy pile on the small bookcase beside his desk. “A tricky and difficult time,” read the entry for the card. "The Five of Wands suggests that one will meet opposition that can only be overcome through cunning and resourcefulness. This opposition takes the form of some competing interest, a talented person or powerful group of people who do not share one’s plans, goals, and attitudes, and may even scheme against one…"
It fitted the machinations of the nobles, but Geraint felt that the card was pointing to something else, something more shadowy than a vote on a government bill. As the sense of unease grew within him, he tried to put it aside as he prepared for his appointment with Manchester. He ran a bath while brushing the charcoal-gray Italian suit cut with just the right conservatism and inconspicuousness for the House of Nobles. The scents of ylang ylang, orange blossom, and sandalwood rose with the steam. Geraint rubbed the fatigue from his eyes and began the work of massaging his facial muscles. He felt his thirtieth birthday looming ominously close this morning. Maybe it was the time of life when a man’s thoughts turned to collagen implants.
"Good. That’s settled.” Manchester was in an affable mood, partly because of his assurance that the government forces he’d marshaled would win the vote, but mostly thanks to a third fine Armagnac having made its way to his grossly spreading gut. "Oh, by the way, old boy, did you get an invitation to the Cambridge bash this weekend?”
Geraint’s ears pricked up. If the earl was referring to some function hosted by the Duchess of Cambridge, he definitely wanted an invitation. Francesca Hamilton was a most attractive woman, still only recently widowed and, most important of all, she was the richest woman in Britain.
"You mean Francesca’s do?” He brazened it out as if he’d known about it all along. A mistake; Manchester frowned slightly, but he was too dull-witted with drink to note Geraint’s over-familiarity. "Don’t know about that. Bloody woman doesn’t have many parties I get to hear about. Never enough drink at them anyway."
“No, my boy, there’s a high-powered meeting of Nobles in Business at the University Arms over the weekend. Starts Friday morning. Seminars and all that sod. Bunch of corporate wallahs behind it all, as usual. Can’t be bothered myself. If you like, take my invitation and I’ll tell the stuffed suits I’ve recommended you instead. I’m off grouse shooting with old Hamish.”
"That’s extraordinarily generous of you, sir. I’d be most appreciative." Geraint was curious about the meeting, and amused at the thought of his portly lunch companion blasting away at a bunch of hapless game birds with antique firearms, accompanied by the broomstick-thin and notoriously bad-tempered Earl of Dundee. The Cambridge meeting was of interest because it might yield Geraint some useful contacts. His investigations of the Zeta-ImpChem corporate system hadn’t come to much; their defenses were so fierce and so stacked against deckers sniffing at their forbidding Matrix systems that he didn’t dare risk it. There might be easier ways of finding out what was going on in the pharmaceuticals market. Getting a corporate suit to wax loquacious by plying him with alcohol was still easier than trying to hack one’s way past deadly intrusion countermeasures. Human weaknesses were still more predictable than any technology. Cambridge could be a good opportunity.
Geraint set his glass down on the polished mahogany table just as the first bell sounded calling the nobles into the debating chamber.
The earl rose to his feet with a grunt, the effort accompanied by a thunderous fart, which Geraint pointedly ignored. "Come on my boy, let’s teach those blasted pixies a lesson about the power of the vote. That’s what democracy is all about.”
Francesca hunched over the Fuchi Cyber-6. Decking played such havoc with her shoulder muscles that she’d need a massage afterward, but looking forward to that was part of the buzz. She was traveling light in the Matrix, having loaded a cloak program to mask her operations, analyze and browse programs for quick checks through datastores and structures, and a powerful sleaze program to get past any ID checks en route. As usual, she also had a restore program ready to repair any damage done to her deck’s MPCP, the master persona control program that was the heart of her deck’s operations. She’d paid a third of a million nuyen for the cyberdeck, and wasn’t about to risk its destruction. As a further guarantee, an alarm seed program left monitors behind that would alert her to any pursuit as she sped down the datastream.
She made a quick check on her bearings, the data bits glowing and swirling around the nondescript child that was her persona in the Matrix. This was no more than a routine job, really; checking the datastores of a very minor research group stuck away in Kent would take no more than half an hour, after which she could copy and decrypt anything interesting at her leisure. The job didn’t really justify the fee, but they were paying for her reputation. Besides, she needed extra for Rutger, the barman at the Lounging Lizard, where she often had her meets. Keeping him on a hefty retainer greased the wheels of her style, making her negotiations generally swifter and more professional. That also helped guarantee more work to follow. This was just a preliminary snoop, after all.
As she entered the system access node of Howarth Associates’ system, a feeble access program tried to check her ID. The sleaze program got her past the barrier so effortlessly that she was actually looking forward to something more challenging further into the heart of the system. Meanwhile she used the analyze program to check the sub-processing unit ahead, identifying it as the SPU controlling the flow of data to other SPUs within the system. Super! No need to get to the central processor, where she’d surely encounter more severe countermeasures and checks. She could work from this basic point.
The SPU had one nice touch in defense: a tar baby trap that would have crashed and dumped her sleaze program without ceremony had her sleaze not been able to fool it. It looked like that sleaze had been worth every nuyen she’d paid for it because the tar baby let her pass easily. Speeding further along the cluster of SPUs and into the datastores, she ran her analysis and data-checking programs while also keeping tabs on the alarm seed monitors. No reaction from the system, no alerts. It was like stealing candy from a sleeping baby.