A Break in the Sunlight

23. Stealing Bandwidth

Jaren took her time walking up the crowded ramp to the Gennwrugh Building. Her hands were shoved casually into her pockets, and her gaze careless.

She was mostly unremarkable in this crowd of urban business people. Many, like her, had short bleached hair and henna-painted eyes. Others were more conservative. But her black miniskirt wasn't the shortest in the crowd by far, her jacket not the most imposing. She affected a bored look, moving through the throng, closer to the door, eyes alert beneath the chic, disaffected expression.

Around her neck she wore an ID card for the Gennwrugh Concourse. It identified her as an info-file clerk for one of the mezzanine bond traders. Biddle had an arrangement with one of the security personnel, there, and had gotten her the ID, complete with retinal scan on file. Her delivery was on the seventh floor west. She was to meet her contact at the elevators.

But first there was the lobby to deal with.

Gennwrugh was a monolith of a building. Owned by one of the big congloms out of Central, it housed most of the financial dealings for this sector within its walls. New twenty years ago, the complex was starting to acquire the dated look of an architect that had tried too hard. But if its tenants noticed, it didn't much affect them.

The streets outside the building's kilometer-long expanse were crowded for acres with satellite companies. Designers, travel agencies, currency brokers, assassins, anything. And in the midst of them all, the financial giant loomed, physical bulk mirroring fiscal bulk. In this district of Sona, money ruled and information was a paved shortcut to Heaven. In this district of Sona, Gennwrugh was God.

The immense glass doors slid open as she approached the building, and from them flooded the echoes of hundreds of murmuring voices, superimposed with the clicking of security counters, humming of machines and the honey-smooth female voices bleeding from the announcement systems above.

Jaren stepped inside the cavernous space, where the layers of walkways stretched out and up. At the far end were the security stops, required before you could ascend to the higher levels. To the left were the food courts, glassed in by tall windows with enhanced sunlight that made even a gloomy Sona afternoon blaze with energy. To the right were directories and a bank of public nodes, and beyond them, rows of Gennwrugh-owned mall shops. Company stores.

Everywhere voices buzzed, murmured and bleated. Humanoids and aliens of all types milled around Jaren as she stopped to get her bearings. Each intent on his own mission. Caffeine. Presentation materials. Lunch. Galactic domination.

Jaren stepped to a directory and pushed the touchscreen, wanting to map out her course before she went through the security stalls. They shouldn't be a problem. Biddle had told her what to expect. They would just check her ID and let her through. The flatliners they hired to do the checks didn't have scanning ability, even if the companies in Gennwrugh would allow such a thing, routinely.

She clicked through the screens of the directory kiosk. Take the escalator on the other side of the stalls, then a catwalk to the central deck, from there, catch a people mover to the West tower and finally an elevator to the seventh floor, where her contact would be waiting.

And not a moment too soon, Jaren thought darkly. She was getting a little antsy with this run. Biddle had made it pretty clear—she was on her own and she'd better not mess it up.

"And Jaren... " Biddle had added. "Don't dump this one. It's an original file." He had tried to look nonchalant when he said it, but Jaren could see the tic in his jaw, the thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, and the mild tremor of his fingers as he plugged her up. He was scared, and that didn't exactly instill her with warm fuzzies. She was carrying, as Lucy would have said, some serious juju, and the sooner it was safely delivered and out of her head, the better Jaren would feel.