Date: 2024-08-15T04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Theogony Books

Shadow Wired

Book One of Shadow Wired

By

Gustavo Bondoni

PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books

Copyright © 2024

All Rights Reserved

* * * * *

Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

* * * * *

To Emilia and Sofía, who grew from babies to girls in the time I wrote this book.

* * * * *

Cover Design by J Caleb Design.

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

About the Author

Excerpt from Book One of Blood and Armor:

Excerpt from Book One of The Sergey Chronicles:

Excerpt from Book One of The Last Marines:

Excerpt from Book One of The Prince of Britannia Saga:

* * * * *

Chapter 1

Guangzhou, China

“It’s precisely because you’re not Chinese that we chose you. They won’t trust us,” the guy seated on the chairmen’s right said.

“That assumes a lot,” Christian Gonzalez replied.

“It assumes nothing. It’s the logical conclusion of our investigation.”

The chairman, a man whose dark face was all wrinkles, held up a hand. “Mr. Gonzalez,” he said, “we trust our workers. All of them, regardless of their origin. But in this case, Mr. Lau has been extremely thorough. I’m satisfied that we’re not dealing with corruption from management here but with common theft—albeit on a massive scale. We could put a stop to it easily enough… but that would require draconian measures against all our foreign employees.” He held Gonzalez’s gaze, presumably to see if he grasped what he was trying to convey. Seemingly satisfied, he continued. “But only as a last resort. If we can identify the individuals responsible, that will make life much easier for everyone else. And for us.”

His name wasn’t really Gonzalez, but the man sitting in front of him didn’t need to know that.

“So you want me to try to find out how it’s happening?”

The guy who spoke for the chairman piped up again, seemingly shocked at the fact that the corporation’s exalted leader had spoken to Gonzalez directly. “Exactly. Your record is excellent, and you have shown loyalty to the company over the years. In fact, you are the senior-most foreign employee in our security division. The most trusted non-Chinese individual in the company.”

That wasn’t saying much, Gonzalez thought. Guangzhou Central Manufacturing was not an organization given to trusting anyone very far who wasn’t part of the family. All outsiders—even Chinese from excellent universities—watched assorted cousins and in-laws pass them on the race up the ladder. Of course, in Gonzalez’s case, he also got to watch the other Chinese pass him, as well. Still, five years of effective problem-solving tended to erase a lot of prejudice.

“You are the perfect person to blend in with the workers and attempt to solve the riddle.”

“All right.” Gonzalez sighed. “I’ll give it a shot.”

“Thank you,” the chairman replied, nodding slightly.

The mouthpiece seemed like he was about to have a fit, so Gonzalez nodded back, and then spoke exclusively to him. “I’m sure you have a briefing prepared for me with the relevant cover information.”

“Yes. Right here.” He passed a data card over the table. Gonzalez nodded once, a gesture finely calculated to express respect for the other man’s efficiency, and then stood. “I will go review this. Thank you for trusting me.”

They allowed him to leave.

* * *

Level 97 was a far cry from the upper stories. Whereas managers—even lowlier managers such as Gonzalez—were allotted sunlit window and garden-bedecked terraces with several rooms, most common workers and their families dwelt deep inside the enormous bulk of the arcology. It was a question of available surface area: most of the habitation units necessarily had to be in the interior of the building.

Gonzalez had serious misgivings about the living conditions he would be subjected to for this assignment but found his assigned unit on a well-lit corridor that, despite obvious signs of scuffing and use, looked and smelled as though it had just been cleaned with some kind of lemon-scented disinfectant. There were a few people around, but the crowds that supposedly infested the working people’s quarters were nowhere to be seen.

Likewise, the unit itself, which consisted of a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom, was larger than he expected. The bedroom was four meters square, while the rectangular living room was perhaps six meters by four. That was a lot of space for a single man. The furnishings were used, but again, everything was in good repair, and the illumination was excellent. A wall-screen that showed a waterfall nearly made one forget that the room was buried deep inside one of the largest structures ever devised by man.

Though it was better than the slums this building had replaced, he still couldn’t shake the sense of oppression from being buried under millions of tons of structural steel and concrete. When he was hired, they’d told him that these towers were over-engineered to the point of being nearly indestructible, but the very human awareness that if it did happen to collapse, it would be years before his body was recovered from under the gigantic pile of rubble made Gonzalez restless. He paused only long enough to take a quick shower before heading out to explore his temporary home.

The corridor map showed an open recreational area just a couple of levels down from his position, so he decided to take the ramps rather than wait for one of the notoriously slow elevators.

The hallway opened onto a series of pathways that descended around a triangular atrium. Everything was extraordinarily well-lit… and reminded him of the Mall of the Americas back home. People passed by, more than in the residential areas, but still fewer than he expected from the horror stories he’d heard. Where were the packed, pushing, evil-smelling crowds of manual laborers? The public here seemed to be composed of well-dressed mothers with children and an occasional man having breakfast at one of the concession stands, waiting for a shift to begin.

“Hello. You’re new here, aren’t you?” a voice asked in strangely accented Chinese.

The girl looked like a stewardess from one of the Arab-owned stratoflight carriers, dressed in a bright red hat and scarf, and a blue uniform made of some kind of cloth reminiscent of the denim that had been ubiquitous twenty years earlier.

“Yes? But how did you know?” Though it wasn’t packed, there were hundreds of people in view in the cavernous space. Any clue to how she’d spotted him so quickly might help him complete his mission without drawing undue attention to himself. “Are you a mind reader?”

The girl laughed. It was a pretty sight that lit up her face, and Gonzalez tried to guess where she might be from. Her pale skin and close-cropped black hair indicated Italy or maybe southeastern Europe. Whatever it was, she would have looked stunning even without the beautiful clothing. “It’s the map app. It sends out a locator whenever you activate it… and assigns a Greeter.”

Greeter. Only one kind of person was employed as a Greeter. Without realizing what he was doing, Gonzalez gave her a second look, but couldn’t see anything immediately wrong with her.

The girl held up a hand. The fingers were prosthetic, but so well-made that he would never have been able to tell if she hadn’t called attention to it. “I think this is what you’re looking for. I was born with a malformed hand. The new one is excellent, but not good enough for delicate assembly work. But I can type, and having a hand that can actually plug into computers and other equipment can come in really handy. It’s completely wired to my nervous system, and the skin looks exactly like my own. You can’t tell it’s there unless you knew already.”

“I’m sorry. That was incredibly rude of me.”

“Don’t be. The thing I hate the most is when people try to pretend that they don’t care what happened to me. The ones who look, and especially the ones who ask, are usually people who want to have a real conversation, and not to ignore the matter until I go away.”

“Um…”

“Come on. I mean it. Now let me do my job.”

“All right. I’m Christian Gonzalez. What’s your job?”

“To show you around. To make you feel comfortable, and to let you know that you’re not alone in this big, new world.”

“How can one be alone in a building with two hundred thousand people in it?”

“By not talking to any of them and cutting themselves off to explore new levels of sadness and sociopathy. That’s what the Greeters are here to avoid.”

“So what do you do? Are you, like, a tour guide?” he asked.

She laughed again. “A bit. But more like a friend who knows a place and shows you around. What do you want to see?”

“I don’t even know what there is to see.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is the company getting lax, or were you asleep during the mandatory briefing?”

Gonzalez recalled the pile of papers and flagged videos on his phone… which he’d blithely ignored. After all, he’d been with GCM for five years. “I spent most of it in the bathroom. The new food got to me.”

This time, she avoided laughing and gave him what had to be a rehearsed look of earnest sympathy. “That happens much more often than people think. The water here in Guangzhou is probably the safest on Earth, but if your body is not used to the microbes in our particular biome, then it can cause problems.” She changed the subject—likely her training kicking in again. “I suggest we begin with the pool.”

“Sure, show me.”

She talked as they walked. “The pool is actually the largest indoor body of water in the world. It holds—”

Gonzalez cut her off. “I thought you were going to be my friend, not a tour guide. I’m sure I’ll be impressed even if you don’t tell me everything about it. Tell me about you.”

“Me? I’m just a girl from Sarajevo,” she said, and Gonzalez privately celebrated that he’d guessed at least a little bit of her ancestry correctly. “The arcology is one of the wonders of the modern world. Why would you want to hear about me?”

“Because, if I could find a window, I could see ten buildings just like this one without having to bend my neck too far. But there’s only one of you.”

This time, the smile wasn’t the professional-grade item they trained them to show. It was rueful and a bit lopsided. “I wish you’d been around when I was a teenager. I always felt that I was just one of ten million identical girls.” She held up her hand. “Except that I was less identical than the others.”

“Surely prettier, though?”

“Oh, god, no!” She laughed. “I was totally lost in the crowd, and that was the way I preferred it.”

“All right. But you’re not getting off the hook. Tell me about yourself.”

“There really isn’t that much to tell. I had a totally boring childhood. Went to an English school in Bistrik—that’s just south of my house in the city.”

“So why are we speaking Chinese?” he asked her in English.

She shrugged. “We’re supposed to,” she answered in excellent English made beautiful by her lilt. “It actually helps the new fish get acclimatized to the language.”

“New fish?”

She giggled. “Sorry. We’re not supposed to say that in front of them… er you… eh… crap.”

Gonzalez laughed with her, happy to have gotten past her training to the human on the other side of it. “Don’t worry. Besides, I’m not that new. Been with the company for a while, even here in Guangzhou. But this is the first time they’ve let me see all of this…” They split up to let a group of running children pass between us. “So you went to school in Sarajevo.”

“Yes, then I went to college and studied public relations… so when I heard about the GCM Greeter program, I applied. It was ridiculously easy to get in, actually, and I’ve been here since the beginning. I got to tour the first arcology before they opened it to residents.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“I love it. I actually feel like it’s the job I was meant to have. I make life a little better for others, and no one cares about this.” She held up her hand.

“I can see what you mean.” Other Greeters had much worse physical problems: it was company policy to only hire people who were physically impeded from working in manufacturing as Greeters. Everyone else in this complex went into the factories. Or, like Gonzalez, into security.

The tour was just about what he expected, but he did manage to get her to agree to meet him for coffee a couple of days later when she came off shift. That wasn’t part of the job, but he genuinely liked her smile—the real one, not the corporate-mandated one—and welcomed having a friend who wasn’t related to what he’d come to do.

* * *

To get to his first shift, he couldn’t avoid the elevator and, for the first time, came to understand what everyone was referring to when they griped about the crowds in the workers’ areas. The line at the collection point—there was a collection point for express elevators every forty floors—was nearly fifty meters long.

Gonzalez settled in for a long wait—he had timed his departure to arrive extremely early precisely because of the crowds—but he was in for another surprise: the elevator absorbed the entire line, which must have held more than a hundred workers, with plenty of room left over for the people who boarded at another ten stops on the way. Accustomed to using the tiny management lift, he hadn’t been ready for the sheer size of this one. It had several floors with padded seats.

It descended quickly, and he left his stomach somewhere around the ninetieth floor. For the first time since the assignment began, Gonzalez felt he was entering well-known territory: the massive underground factory floors buried below the arcology and supporting its weight. His real job, when he wasn’t undercover, was in the equivalent area of one of the company’s arcologies, two or three times a week, looking at gaps identified in both safety and security issues. Most revolved around computer security and data protection, which was looked after by offsite teams, but sometimes physical security came into the mix, and he logged countless hours inspecting the various buried factories.

He’d never used the employee entrance before and was new to this particular arcology; it would have been the apogee of stupidity to send a well-known security officer in undercover. The fact that he’d studied the material carefully—having learned his lesson from the Greeter incident—saved Gonzalez from embarrassment at the initial entry point. The elevator opened into a circular chamber from which bright corridors radiated out in six color-coded directions.

He went the orange way, onto a sloping spiral ramp that took him a further five or six stories underground.

“Gonzalez?” a voice said. “You’re the new guy on the crew, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” He turned to see a tall Chinese man wearing blue overalls and the white hardhat that identified him as one of the engineers.

“Come with me. I’m supposed to show you around. I have your papers in my office.” He led the way to an enclosed gray cube with just enough space for two chairs and a table between them. “Sit down,” he said as he closed the door.

Gonzalez sat.

“My name is Qian Lei,” he said, “and I know why you’re here.”

Gonzalez said nothing and wished he could raise an eyebrow. Not having that particular talent, however, he let Qian continue.

“The missing components are all coming from this sector, and it’s driving me nuts. I’ve had security watch all the warehouse workers with access to the storeroom, but unless they’re swallowing the stuff, they’re not guilty. And if they were swallowing them, we’d know, because they’d be dead pretty soon, and the problem would solve itself.”

“What are they taking?”

“Memory cores, mainly.”

The cores were tiny cylinders made of metallic salts which, for consumer uses, were molded into plastic chips. By weight, they were probably the most valuable item in the entire factory, but, as Lei noted, they were poisonous as hell—even handling them without gloves posed health risks.

Gonzalez sighed. “I should have known.”

“What?”

“That we were dealing with poisonous substances.”

“How could you have known?”

Because management sent a foreigner in to take the risks, Gonzalez didn’t say. Instead, he shrugged. “That’s the way my luck goes, I guess.”

“You should put the spirits on your side,” Lei replied earnestly. “Bad luck is only misguided spiritual energy.”

Gonzalez suppressed yet another sigh. Many Chinese, even the sophisticated ones who made Americans look like country bumpkins in comparison, believed they were experts on the topics of spirits and could go on for hours on the subject. Gonzalez wasn’t in the mood; he wanted to do his job so he could get back to his real life. “All right. So I’m here to find out who’s stealing memory cores and stop them.”

“No. You’re here to find out who’s stealing memory cores and report them to me. Don’t interfere. The people on the bottom of the ladder are just pawns. We need to get to the distributors.”

Gonzalez reassessed the man. Initially, he’d seemed to be just a low-level supervisor who’d gotten a crappy assignment. But it was clear from his confident tone when speaking to someone he should have considered a superior that there was more going on there; he was probably another senior manager assigned to a lousy piece of in-company police work.

Which, in turn, led Gonzalez to suspect that there was a lot more at stake than his briefing papers suggested.

Of course, he already knew all that, but it was nice to get confirmation.

Lei went on. “You’re going to be assigned to a team of assembly workers, one of whose members just got promoted to run a team in a different division. As the new guy, it will be your job to assemble the memory cores.” He grinned. “Everyone knows that’s the worst part of the assembly job. The team leader reports to me, so you’ll be watching them from below, and I’ll be watching them from above.”

“Sounds good.”

Lei led Gonzalez to the changing room, pointed out his assigned locker, and introduced him to the single other member of the team present, a young woman named Sharista. She was maybe 25 years old, with dusky skin and jet-black hair, and her teeth, dazzling white, seemed to burst from between her lips when she smiled—which she did quite often.

“This is your locker,” he said. “I expect you to familiarize yourself with the safety manual before going onto the factory floor. Let me know if you need anything.” With that, Lei walked away.

“I probably won’t be voting him for the supervisor of the year award,” Sharista said as soon as the man was safely out of hearing.

Gonzalez played along. “A bit dry, huh?”

“He’s not actually that bad, but he’s a stickler for the rules. Probably worried that acting like a human will harm his career path.”

“He might be right.”

“Don’t be silly. He’s Han Chinese. He can come to work naked and piss into the reactor pots, and still get promoted. They say he only had to spend three years on a line before they made him a supervisor.”

That comment served to reinforce Gonzalez’s sense that he was part of something major. It was relatively simple to infiltrate a worker and a supervisor, but much more difficult to orchestrate a campaign to affect the company rumor mill. Lei’s backstory had been inserted into the common knowledge of the workers. By custom that approached the strength of law, employees trusted the rumors they heard to be reliable… certainly much more than anything management said. Getting that to work in management’s favor was a stroke of genius, not to mention very hard to do.

He nodded. “So what everyone warned me about before I came here is true? The Chinese run the place like a prison, and the rest of us are no better than slaves?”

She shook her head. “No. They’re actually pretty good nowadays. I know it used to be that way, but that was before the reforms and the Economic Miracle. Nowadays, they treat everyone as well as they can afford to. I hear the execs get upper-floor mansions with windows.”

“Yeah,” Gonzalez replied uncomfortably. “I heard that, too.”

“Seems like a waste, giving windows to people instead of building the schools and public places on the building’s skin.”

He thought about his own quarters. Perhaps it was a waste, but it sure made all the work, and life so far from home, a lot more enjoyable. “You’re probably right.”

“Your Chinese is pretty good for a newbie. Where are you from?”

“I’m from the US, originally, but I’ve been in Asia for a long time. First time in an integrated production city, though.”

“What do you think of it so far?”

“I took the elevator to work this morning. My commute lasted five minutes. Back in Beijing, I never took less than an hour to get to work, and the crowding was much worse.”

The rest of the shift began filing in slowly, and Sharista introduced his new teammates as they arrived: Lu, Warren, Xia, Lucrezia, and Hal, the team leader. Each shook Gonzalez’s hand and welcomed him to the team in the exact way everyone always did in these situations.

They moved into the workspace and, despite having memorized the position of the assigned work area, Gonzalez pretended to be lost in the huge space and to follow them in order to get his bearings. Likewise, when they sat him down to begin building the cores, he allowed them to guide him through each step of a process that he knew back to front; he’d memorized the activity when his security team was designing the safety equipment for the workers.

The work was easier than he expected. Reams of reports had assured him that most workers needed a few days to get anywhere near proficient at most manual tasks, and no doubt they were right, but after a couple of hours—with plenty of rest breaks—Gonzalez fell into a rhythm that certainly felt productive, even if that was just an illusion.

Time passed quickly, and soon enough, it was time to leave.

“You coming?” Sharita called.

“In a second. Need to finish one final core.”

That was true, a deliberately half-assembled unit sat on his desk, and he clicked the components together. Once it was done, he turned so his back blocked one of the cameras, and the shelf holding the parts blocked the other, and slipped the component into a small pouch sewn into his underwear.

Then he straightened and headed for the locker room, where he changed before continuing toward the elevator. There was no sign of his teammates, which was exactly how he wanted it.

The shift had been over for half an hour by the time he left, which meant that the elevators were pretty much empty. There was only one woman in line ahead of him, and the lift reached his floor almost immediately.

He walked inside and pressed the button for level 97. The lift didn’t move.

The woman tapped her feet impatiently, but it still stayed where it was.

Finally, four men in security uniforms entered. “Come with us,” one of them told him.

He nodded and followed without a word.

* * *

A vein on the side of Qian Lei’s forehead looked like it would burst and spray blood all over the interview room in which he’d locked them. “Are you completely stupid?” he asked. “The only reason I don’t fire you now is because I know you weren’t responsible for any of the other thefts. We scan every person, management or employee, who comes into these complexes, so we’d know if you’d been here before.”

He was lying. The reason he didn’t have Gonzalez fired was because the chairman himself had personally requested his presence there. This man had to know.

“I needed to test your security.”

“You should have asked.”

“Would you have told me?”

Lei glared.

“I thought so. Look, I know you don’t trust anyone, but there’s information I need to do this job. I just saved myself days of work by eliminating the possibility that the thieves are taking the cores out via the elevators.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t have believed you. I simply would have assumed that you had no clue about your own limitations, and that someone with a little bit of ingenuity was getting past your security.” Gonzalez returned his look, unafraid, and Lei’s belligerence fell a notch or so. He still wasn’t happy, but he was probably thinking he would have done the same thing had their positions been reversed. “Now, where did you catch me?”

He sighed. “At the elevator. We’ve got really advanced scanners there specifically looking for memory cores. We installed them after the thefts started.”

“How do they work?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Typical. Well, Gonzalez knew they weren’t detecting radiation, and they weren’t using x-rays; his pouch was lead-lined against that. So they had some proprietary, high-tech system in place that they didn’t even want security managers at Gonzalez’s level to know about. He’d learn about it soon enough through the rumor mill, of course, but too late to help on this assignment. Normal employees—or people pretending to be normal employees while on assignment—didn’t have access to the security department’s rumor mill.

“At least I know one thing: getting the cores off the production floor undetected is child’s play.”

“Perhaps not as much as you think. Eventually, the inventory check would have caught an anomaly, and someone would have watched the tape of the shift in question. We’d have caught it.”

Watching eight hours of footage from various cameras, looking for some small, anomalous movement was much worse than the old cliché about the needle in the haystack, but GCM had plenty of people on the security staff doing just that. “Fair enough. But what I don’t understand is why you don’t have the scanner on the door between the factory floor and the locker room.”

“For the same reason the assembly line isn’t automated: until they’re encased inside their insulation, the cores are too delicate to withstand magnetic fields of a certain strength.”

“I assume that means the one in my pocket is now junk.”

“Yes. Another write-off. You should have taken one with the casing on it.”

“Put it on my department’s budget as an expense. It was worth it. Now, I need to think about the ways in and out of here other than the elevator… and who can get to them.”

“Yes. And if you can do it without stealing any more of my cores… I’d appreciate it.”

Gonzalez nodded and left.

* * *

“OK, now that you’re off duty,” he asked the Greeter, “can you tell me your name? That way, I can put the right contact in my phone. Having you in here as Greeter Girl isn’t very inspiring.”

She laughed. “It’s Jessica. I thought I’d mentioned it.”

“Is that a popular name in Sarajevo?”

“Like me, it was invisible enough.”

“I already told you. You’re extremely pretty.”

“I heard you the first time, and I didn’t believe you. Well, maybe I did, but only enough to get you coffee.”

Gonzalez laughed and tried to remember the last time he’d just talked to a woman outside of work-related issues. Probably in September, on his last vacation in Hong Kong. So… six months. And that one had been American. If he’d said she was pretty upon first meeting her, she would have tried to have him arrested for harassment. The cops would have looked at her as if she’d had two heads, but she would have tried.

“So, play the tour guide for me. Where do we get coffee in here?”

“In here? Nowhere. It’s bad enough that I have to spend all day cooped up in this monstrosity, and the company makes me sleep here, too. We’re going out.”

“Out?” No one went out. The whole point of the arcology was that it had absorbed the city around it. Everything was inside: the apartments, the playgrounds, the schools, the movie theaters, the grocery stores, the cafés. Everything that, woven together, created the tapestry that was a city. They’d even removed the slums and relocated the homeless so the space around the building was nothing but a grass and concrete park: beautiful to look at, but a wasteland to walk around in.

She smiled, challenging. “You asked a Greeter out the first time you talked to her, even though we’re trained to be aloof and romantically unapproachable. That doesn’t sound like someone who’d chicken out on me at the first sign of fresh air.”

He laughed. “Lead on.”

The exit to the outside world was deserted. A bored-looking guy at a desk nodded in their direction as they passed through an automated door. The foyer looked like that of any office building in the US: lots of glass and banks of elevators. The difference was, at six in the evening, an office building would have been overrun by people leaving the place. The arcology’s ground floor was devoid of life.

The same could be said about the plaza outside. From the window of Gonzalez’s apartment—his real window in his manager’s apartment, not the cubicle he was currently assigned to—the concrete-and-shrub design of the gargantuan landscaping project around the arcology was a pleasant pattern. From ground level, it was an emptiness that seemed to extend into infinity.

“Where are we going?”

“Not far. To the river.”

It was a ten-minute walk in hot, humid air. Gonzalez’s body protested that it wanted its air conditioning, the cool dryness of the indoor climate where he’d been a resident for so long. Even when he exercised, he knew the perspiration would soon evaporate, courtesy of the pathological obsession for dry air in the mega-buildings.

“I remember when this was all a huge slum,” he told her.

Jessica laughed. “You’d better not let anyone hear you say that. Officially, Guangzhou never had any slums. The city was modernized in the early 21st century to be one of the jewels of the world, and that is the same process we’re seeing now, eighty years on. The evidence is before your eyes.”

“And what about in between? The uncontrolled growth and mass migration?”

“Myths and exaggerations. Just look around. Do you really think that anyone could build, in a mere ten years, the huge complex of arcologies if there had been slums here to clean out? Preposterous.” Jessica smiled. She knew as well as he did that the official story would soon become gospel truth as those employees old enough to remember differently began to doubt their own memories.

His own remembrance would take a lot of blunting, however. He’d been part of the team that had been assigned to… redeveloping the slums. That task had mainly involved pointing out the more dangerous drug lords and crime families living in the shadows of the towers to the correct authorities. The people he’d identified had a habit of disappearing shortly thereafter and, within three years, the place was cleared, the landscaping begun, and everyone left was absorbed into the social and industrial structure of the arcology.

“What’s at the river?” he asked.

“You’ll see.”

They arrived on the bank and walked along it for a few hundred meters. The water smelled pure and clean, worlds away from the sewer it had been when the slum housed hundreds of thousands of desperately poor migrants.

At one point, Jessica climbed down the bank on a ledge that Gonzalez would have missed if she hadn’t been there to show him the way. A round steel door was laid into the concrete embankment.

Jessica rapped three times, and the sound reverberated hollowly.

Thirty seconds passed before a man opened the door. He seemed to be completely hairless, and his head was spiderwebbed with scar tissue. A black patch covered one eye.

He smiled. “Jessica. Always good to see you, little girl. And I see you’ve brought a boyfriend this time. Nice to see you growing up.”

“Just let us in, Harry.”

The door opened into a concrete tunnel that, in turn, splayed out into a warren of smaller passageways illuminated by incandescent light bulbs—archaic and illegal. Jessica led the way down a couple of them until they reached a wider area where music was playing and groups of people were drinking.

“Welcome to Eldorado,” Jessica said.

Gonzalez didn’t need to feign surprise. He was certain no one in senior management suspected this place existed. The area around the arcologies was supposed to be completely sanitized, and yet, not a kilometer away, here he was, about to have some still-made liquor in a dive bar.

His only regret was not having found out about this place earlier.

Jessica led him to a long table occupied by an overweight guy with two robotic legs and the implant that connected them to his spine, and two women with green hair. “Hi, Jessica,” the man said. “Haven’t seen you around in quite a while.”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t in the mood. This is Christian. Christian, these are Satoru, Abby, and Tabby, although I don’t know which is which.”

“I’m Abby,” one of the green-haired girls tittered.

“And that would make me Tabby,” the other one responded. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Don’t try to memorize which is which,” Jessica warned. “I think they switch from week to week.”

The girls made faces at her, but Satoru laughed. “I’m a Greeter at the arcology,” he said by way of introduction.

“I’m just a worker. I never imagined the Greeters were so much cooler than we are.”

“It’s just a question of spending all our time in what the workers consider the fleshpots of the building. We get bored of malls and theme-park restaurants after a while, and then it comes to the point where we’ll simply explode if we have to stay there any longer. Eventually, once we’ve been proven trustworthy, someone will point us in this direction.”

“What is this place, anyway? The Guangzhou underworld?”

He shrugged. “It can be, if that’s what you’re looking for, but mainly it’s just a place where things are a little less orderly than up in the buildings. All that pleasant organization can drive a man insane. Out here, it’s mainly bars and clubs, maybe a few very light drugs further downstairs. I wouldn’t recommend going in too deep on your first night, though. Feel your way.”

“I’m good with just a few drinks.” Gonzalez turned to Jessica. “What are you having?”

“I don’t think you can buy me a drink. Do you happen to have any barter goods on you?”

“No… I mean, I have my HanCash…”

She laughed. “We’ll put it on my tab.” Jessica walked away before he could stop her and returned with two glasses full of some blue liquid.

Gonzalez gave them the fish-eye.

“What?” she said.

“I have very few rules in life, but one of them is that I never eat or drink anything blue. Especially not that shade of blue.”

“Don’t be a chicken.”

They downed the drinks, and he found himself thinking her smile was too pretty for a place like this.

“I’ll get some more,” she said.

Gonzalez turned to Satoru. “What I don’t understand is how this got built without anyone noticing. I mean, there must be fifty thousand windows looking down onto this spot.”

“No need to build. All of this was already here. Storm drains and drug tunnels. They were blocked off and reinforced as needed when the arcologies went up, but no one thought of filling them in. Why bother, when they couldn’t be accessed? But they forgot to block off the entrance on the embankment, and eventually, someone found it. And here we are.”

“How deep does it go?”

“As far as the foundations of the arcology. Probably even further, but I for one wouldn’t go that deep. Bad juju.”

Jessica returned with two more drinks, and they proceeded to get hammered. At some point, they moved down a tunnel to a club where lights flashed brightly, and the music was too loud. Gonzalez remembered kissing Jessica. He remembered Jessica kissing him back and smelling the warm, musky scent of her skin. He remembered both of them walking back to the arcology, with Satoru in tow.

He remembered a shrill alarm going off as Satoru walked through the door, and the guy at the desk waved him through. Satoru looked at him apologetically. “These new scanners go off every time I take my prosthetics through the door.”

He remembered thinking Qian Lei was one sneaky bastard—even if someone managed to get a core past the detectors in the elevator, they would be caught at the door.

And then he didn’t think about the job anymore.

He remembered that Jessica’s apartment, though no bigger than the one he’d been assigned to, had a window.

* * *

“We can probably take me off the production line. We won’t learn anything new from the crew.”

Qian Lei didn’t seem impressed by the suggestion. “I think it would be best if we went ahead with the original plan, but perhaps you can tell me what you’ve learned so far to make you think so.”

They were seated in the same interview office they’d tossed Gonzalez into after the elevator incident, but at least this time he’d been allowed to find his own way there, by appointment. It was a stark place; polished metal walls and bright overhead lighting ensured the people who sat there knew they weren’t at a social event.

“Your scanner tech pretty much rules out the possibility that the workers are smuggling the cores out themselves, which means that even if I find the people snatching them off the line, that will only bring us the very bottom of the pyramid. Even if they did manage to get upstairs by riding on top of the elevator or some other insanity, they can’t get out of the arcology, anyway. You have scanners on every exit, don’t you?”

Qian Lei raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, so Gonzalez went on. “Which means that anyone trying to get cores away from the arcology would have to fly them out from the airlift bays. All of those are above the two-hundredth level, and that means management.”

Lei sighed. “I wish we’d had you on the job a month and a half ago.”

It was Gonzalez’s turn to be surprised. Qian Lei hardly seemed the type to praise a man he saw as inferior. There was, fortunately, a formulaic answer to cover the surprise. “Thank you.”

“It can’t be helped, I suppose, but in one day on the job, you managed to come to the same conclusion we did just a week before you arrived.” His look was no longer dismissive. “Let’s assume management isn’t involved for now, so no airlifts. What do you think might be happening?”

Gonzalez knew the cores produced here were worth about ten times their weight in gold, so nothing was really off the table. “I see five possibilities right now. I imagine you’ve already covered four of them.”

“Tell me.”

“The first is simply having someone flush the cores down a toilet and retrieving them, either from the pipe, or at the treatment plant, where security is a joke. The second is pretty much the same, but backwards: slipping the cores into a water pipe and having a robot grab them and take them back to a collection point.

“The third is to check our warehouse. I imagine we’re still removing packaging and defective production through the raw materials loading bay.”

“Yes. We are. What else?”

“Then there’s the emergency staircase. Those four, plus the elevators, are the only official ways anything can get in or out of this factory.”

Qian Lei nodded. “We’ve actually checked three of those pretty thoroughly. The toilets might be the way, but if they are, we haven’t figured out how yet. The problem we’re having is, we can check who goes to the toilet, but we haven’t been able to come up with a pattern yet. We’ve checked every inch of the pipe for a place where it might have been tampered with but haven’t found anything. And the processing plant has been secured.

“We can discount the emergency staircase. It sets off every alarm in the factory when you open the door. Even if you override, it gets logged. It has been opened exactly four times in the past three months. Each was for inspection, and in each case, the video shows the inspection team going only about halfway up. The top door wasn’t opened on those occasions.

“And the warehouse… well, we replaced every single employee there with one of ours. If it’s going through the warehouse, there’s someone really high up pulling the strings.”

He then nodded respectfully. “I hadn’t thought of the incoming water pipes. We’ll have to check that. If that’s the way they’re doing it, a few strategically placed grates with alarms should ensure that spider robots can’t move around anymore.” He wrote on a square piece of paper, a neat line of pictograms.

“You don’t think that’s it, do you?”

“I don’t know. But if I had to bet on it, I would place my money on ‘no.’”

Gonzalez nodded. He felt the same way.

“You mentioned a fifth possibility. One we might not have thought of.”

“There are tunnels under the plaza. Old drug tunnels and sewers from the slums that were there before. They might lead right up to the foundations of the arcology. I know drilling through yards of concrete isn’t cheap or easy, but for a steady supply of cores, it might just be worth it.”

Qian Lei groaned. “Do you know how big a job it will be to check the foundations? They’re huge.”

“Yes, I know it perfectly well.” Gonzalez grinned at him, delighted to have finally broken through his aloofness. “That’s what makes me so happy that, on this job, I’m just doing grunt work. Normally, I have to deal with those headaches.”

“Thanks a lot,” he replied sourly. “Now get back to work.”

He wasn’t convinced they were going out that way, and Gonzalez’s respect for him rose a notch. Despite the fact that the tunnels did exist, and that would be the logical way to do it—well, logical if you were the type of person who would risk having an arcology drop onto your head because you broke its foundations just so you could make a little money—it just felt wrong. That’s why Qian Lei had groaned. He couldn’t ignore it, but his gut was telling him it would be a huge waste of time.

That earned him a nod. Gonzalez’s gut was saying the same thing.

* * *

All through the next shift, Gonzalez watched the rest of his team like a hawk. If they’d placed him there, it meant that at least one core had gone missing under this crew’s watch. If they’d taken something since he’d joined them, he hadn’t seen it.

This time, he made certain to leave the factory floor with the team and joined the banter as they removed the overalls that covered their civilian clothes and changed their shoes. This was a clean, light-load sector of the production facility, which meant there was no need to change all their clothes, just to be sure they weren’t building up static electricity.

Gonzalez watched them banter, observing who they spoke to. The only other crew around was a maintenance team—always easy to spot in their brown overalls—and the team exchanged gossip and pleasantries with them, comfortable in each other’s presence as people employed together for extended periods often were; each group trusted the other to remain in its place an on its schedule.

Sharista looked his way. “We generally go out for a beer at the end of the Friday shift,” she said. “Wanna come?”

“I’d love to.”

“Great.” Everyone smiled. Gonzalez smiled back.

He expected this crew to be more hardcore than the Greeters. After all, Greeters, everyone knew, were the pampered favorites of GCM management, given cushy jobs not for their abilities, but for their physical limitations. This was a team that worked with lethal chemicals, creating priceless things. After going out with the Greeters, he was almost afraid to ask where they were going.

The answer turned out to be comically prosaic. Up the elevator, into a large mall area that could have been the twin of the one he’d wandered into by chance on his first day in the worker’s levels, and around a plastic table in a bar designed to look like a typical American sports bar of the previous century, except he suspected it was probably much too well-illuminated for that.

The drinks—beer imported from Japan—were tame, and the conversation even started off with a quick run-through of everyone’s spouses, children, and pets, as well as the latest family medical news. A far cry from getting smashed in an illegal underground watering hole just yards from the authorities, and then staggering back across the concrete desert.

“And what about you, Gonzalez; any significant others?”

The image of Jessica silhouetted against her window at dawn flashed across his mind, but he said, “No. Single and still trying to figure out how things work around here.”

“Yeah, it can take a while,” Hal, the quietest member of the group, said, “but let us know when you get bored. Lucrezia here is a bottomless well of single women.”

The Italian woman laughed. “I’m a matchmaker, just like my grandmother. I love seeing other people happy.”

Gonzalez smiled back at her. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So how’d you end up here?”

He told them the same story he’d regaled Jessica with.

“Do you like it in here?”

Gonzalez shrugged. “I guess. I miss being out on the street, but it’s good to know we’re safe and warm inside. And there’s certainly plenty of people around.”

“Yeah. You’ll get used to it, though. Once you’ve been here a few weeks, it will feel like the hallways are the real outside,” Lu said. He was the only Chinese member of the shift and spoke with the air of authority that being local conveyed upon him. The fact that arcology life was new to everyone seemed to make little difference in the dynamic; squatter’s rights on being right about everything automatically went to the guy born in Guangzhou—or the nearest available substitute.

“I suppose. I’m actually more worried about the management structure. What’s it like in here? It seems like the company has a hell of a lot of control over our lives.” That was one of the lines managers were always told to watch out for when dealing with employees.

It elicited a general shrug. “Who knows?” Sharista said. “No one forced us to come here. They got more volunteers than they could shake a stick at. After all, the money we’re saving on rent is going straight into our accounts.”

“Unless you spend it here.”

“On what? You can’t really buy anything expensive. There aren’t any cars, you don’t have a ton of storage room in the living units, and I think this is the most expensive place to buy food.”

As he listened to the rest of their conversation, Gonzalez couldn’t help but think they sounded completely unlike any subversive group he’d ever heard of. The evidence said they had to be a part of what was going on… the question was why. It certainly had little or nothing to do with resentment about how they were treated.

Eventually, they began to drift off. As one of the singles in the group, he stuck around until he got a message from Jessica asking if he was free. Gonzalez made his excuses and left.

He found her pacing a bit impatiently when he reached the foyer. He hung his head sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I got lost on the way.”

She laughed, irritation gone. “Why didn’t you ask a Greeter how to get down here? Not all the elevators stop at this level.”

“I know that now. Next time, I’ll ask.”

She gave him a chaste peck on the cheek under the watchful gaze of the bored guard and led him out the door. Suddenly, every alarm on the floor went off.

Jessica sighed and walked back in, but the security guy just waved her back. “It’s the arm,” he said, pointing at his monitor. “You can go.”

She turned back to Gonzalez, the uncertain look on her face the first sign of insecurity she’d shown. “Now it’s my turn to apologize. Some days, the electronics in this thing set off the sensors; others, they don’t.”

“No need to apologize.”

“I should have warned you. And now you’ll be thinking about the arm all night.”

“Then distract me. And besides, it’s such a beautiful piece of engineering that I really can’t tell where your skin ends, and the prosthetic begins. Just like you said.” That much was true. Gonzalez had completely forgotten about the arm the previous night. In fact, until the alarm went off…

And then a thought hit him, and he had to keep himself from laughing out loud.

So that’s how they did it, he thought.

But all he said was, “Back to the bar?”

She smiled a smile that promised an interesting night. “I was thinking of going a little deeper into the tunnels this evening.”

“But I can’t pay for anything. My money’s no good in there.”

“The next time we go out, you can pay me back. But not tonight. Tonight, I’m buying. My tab can take it.”

“Are we celebrating something?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

She looked deep into his eyes. “That you’re the first guy I’ve ever believed when he told me he’d forgotten about the arm.”

Jessica led him across the concrete wasteland toward the riverbank.

* * *

It was incredibly easy to settle into a routine, to feel that his adopted life was actually his own. On the fourth day at the factory, Gonzalez even resented being called away from his post to speak to Qian Lei. He had a quota to meet, and the clock was ticking.

Worse, the only reason Lei had called him in was to gripe.

“Do you know how deep the foundations of this monstrosity are?”

“I imagine they’re pretty deep. These are the world’s largest buildings, after all.”

“And wide, too. They spread out in every direction, something about a stable footprint.”

“I usually let architects and engineers worry about that kind of thing.” Gonzalez knew they were big because the old tunnels that he and Jessica frequented wound between and around the foundations for this arcology and the next one upstream. They seemed to go on forever.

“Well, I checked up, and those old tunnels are still down there, just like you said. So we have to search every inch of the walls for doors leading out and check every piling to be certain someone hasn’t hollowed it out and turned it into a highway for stolen products. It will take days to do it correctly. How the hell did you learn about those tunnels, anyway?”

“Just something someone mentioned back when I was in my previous position.”

“All right. Are you making any progress with the workers?”

“Some. I think I know who might be involved in this, and I have a theory about how they’re pulling it off, but I still need to catch them in the act to be sure.”

“I suppose you’re not going to tell me about it?”

“No. I don’t want to be responsible for wasting more of your time if I’m wrong.”

Lei gave Gonzalez a dark look. “Yes. I’m still angry at myself for letting you talk about the foundations. If you do get anything solid, let me know, though.”

“We both know you think I’m wasting my time,” Gonzalez said. “You think someone in management—maybe even in the family—is behind all this, and anyone I catch will simply be reassigned elsewhere as punishment… and so will we, if we find anyone.”

He refused to be drawn. “I have my orders. So do you. Get back to work.”

It had been a long time since Gonzalez was labor as opposed to head man on one of these things. He’d forgotten how much fun it was to watch others sweat bullets, so he didn’t even bother to tell Lei that he was barking up the wrong tree. Gonzalez had no proof of his suspicions, but he would have bet a considerable sum that nothing was getting out through the building’s foundations.

His workstation was waiting for him when he arrived. The team toiled in a clean environment with small conveyor belts whirring to themselves as they brought in raw materials and transported finished parts to the next station. Their electric motors were buried in the walls to avoid damaging unshielded components. No one looked up as he made his way back into position.

And then he saw it. Just as he stepped between Sharista and one of the cameras, a flash of movement from her position caught his eye. He’d been trained to spot magicians doing their tricks, so his brain automatically generated the sense that a movement didn’t belong. It filled in what Gonzalez didn’t actually see: a hand had moved something from place A—the table, in this case—to place B, her overalls, in a way that wasn’t meant to be observed. It wasn’t hard to fill in the rest: Sharista had palmed a memory core.

Gotcha!

He didn’t confront her, didn’t slow, didn’t turn his head to get a better look. Gonzalez just did what he had been planning to do all along: walked to his seat and got back to work. Inside, though, he was happy to finally have been able to spot what he’d been sent there to find. A weight he didn’t know he’d been carrying lifted off his shoulders.

The shift, which he’d been enjoying, ended too soon, and they retired to the dressing room. Gonzalez observed Sharista closely, looking to see if she bumped into anyone seemingly by accident, or furtively dropped a package. She stayed clean all the way to the changing room, where she removed the overalls without betraying any signs of nervousness or stress, and tossed them in the hamper to be cleaned. Then they headed toward the elevator.

Gonzalez tensed as Sharista approached it. What if she had nothing to do with the group stealing cores? What if she’d simply decided to take one because she needed the money for some reason? If that was the case, then she would end up in the deepest cell in a Chinese prison—Chinese corporations might have seen the light regarding employee wellbeing, but the penal system had devolved into something that would have made the keepers of the Bastille blanch.

She breezed through the door, which closed behind her. No large men appeared to ask her to go with them.

The memory core had to be in the hamper.

Pretending to have forgotten something, Gonzalez hurried back to the dressing room and sat on one of the benches. The crew that replaced their team on the factory floor was just finishing the process of putting their overclothes on and filing out to work.

The hamper was still there, still full of overalls from the previous shift. That didn’t mean someone from the next crew couldn’t have removed it, but Gonzalez didn’t think so. He sat down, pretending to commune with his phone, and watched the hamper.

Forty-five minutes later, a guy in the brown overalls of the maintenance department popped in, smiled and waved, and wheeled the hamper back into the hallway.

Maintenance, Gonzalez thought. Yep. That would work.

He let the man get a good head start before setting off behind him. The sound of the wheels rolling in the deserted hallways made it easy enough to know where he was without needing to stay in visual contact.

Finally, his quarry disappeared into a door marked Maintenance Personnel Only.

Gonzalez cursed to himself. Following immediately behind was out of the question. The guy would be spooked. Gonzalez needed to give him enough time to get away from the immediate area. That might mean losing him, but it was necessary. He counted to a hundred, slowly.

Then he moved. Using his security override to open the door, Gonzalez emerged in a dimly lit passage that wasn’t painted in motivational colors. Its walls weren’t covered in soft-touch plastics. Instead, everything was functional and gray, with bundles of wires, neatly color-coded, running along the upper walls and the roof.

The guy was nowhere to be seen, but the hamper had been abandoned beside the door. Gonzalez assumed he’d pulled the core out of the overall and headed to the next rendezvous point, leaving the cart there to be retrieved and taken to its final destination on the way back. All work clothes were washed within the factory, so the core couldn’t leave with a bag of laundry.

What Gonzalez needed was to find some connection between these maintenance tunnels and the outside world, at least as far as the arcology above. He already knew how they were getting them out once they got into the upper part of the building.

The only link was the elevator. Unfortunately, he had no idea which tunnel led there.

Choosing a direction at random, he made his way down the hall, popping open one unpromising door after another. He was rewarded with tool storage, a broom closet, and what looked like a server farm spread among three small, freezing rooms.

A humming sound suddenly filled the tunnels, and Gonzalez smiled. He’d heard a diluted version of that noise before, every day as he came down to work, or made his way back to the arcology. It was the sound of the express elevator.

Forgetting his aspirations of stealth, he ran toward the noise, hoping to catch the maintenance guy in the act of… what?

Gonzalez supposed it would be as easy as getting into the correct maintenance shaft and duct-taping the core to the outside of the lift. Someone on the other end could then retrieve it upstairs. They didn’t even have to do it right away. The cores that were stolen were no longer fragile components, but fully shielded units meant for industrial use. They could withstand a few rides on an elevator. This man’s job was finished when he placed it on the side.

The corridor ended at a grating, which had been removed and lay on the walkway. Gonzalez clambered through the hole just in time to see the guy he’d followed heading up a concrete column: the elevator shaft.

It was a colossal thing that disappeared into the darkness, and Gonzalez swallowed at the thought of the millions of tons of building above. For some reason, seeing the shaft somehow brought the reality of the building’s mass home, more than any amount of intellectual knowledge, or looking out from a high window onto the ant-scale world below.

His quarry climbed toward a maintenance window, a small package and a roll of duct tape hanging from his utility belt. After taking a quick picture of the man for his files, Gonzalez turned back. There was no need to physically watch the man tape the core to the lift, and by leaving now, Gonzalez could remain undetected.

Back inside his tiny living quarters, he wrote his report. Qian Lei would be expecting something substantial after Gonzalez had used his personal code to enter the maintenance area. He’d been assigned to a job, and he was going to do it to the best of his ability. He scheduled his email server to send it in three hours.

Then he went looking for Jessica. He checked his watch and realized she would be on her shift for another 45 minutes, so he went to the mall area she was assigned to, sat at a table, and drank some kind of fizzy ginger drink.

She spotted him as he walked in, winked in his direction, but didn’t move from her spot. Gonzalez got to watch her help a family with three small children, a slightly drunken young woman who couldn’t find the bathroom, and answer a series of other minor questions before she walked over to his table and sat down with a sigh.

“Long day?”

“Not particularly. It just feels good to get off my feet.” She gave him a smile. “I didn’t think I’d see you today.”

“Something came up.”

She must have read the concern in his voice or his expression. Her smile died like a doused fie. “What’s wrong?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Her features were guarded now. “About what?” Hurt was creeping into her face.

“I’m not breaking up with you, if that’s what you think this is about. I really like you, in case you hadn’t noticed.” Just how much would soon become apparent to her. “But I do need to talk to you about a few things. And they’re important. Do you trust me?”

She nodded mutely.

“Good. Then follow me.” They set off on the most direct path to his destination.

This time, she laughed. “Who’s the tour guide now?”

“Come on.” She was right about one thing. Gonzalez had looked at a map before leaving his quarters, so he knew exactly what he was doing this time. He walked toward the spot where the movie complex was, then took a sharp left into a long white corridor. An Authorized Personnel Only door marked the end of the hall, and Jessica gasped when he breezed through it. “Don’t worry. This one isn’t alarmed. It’s just a way for the cinema workers to get to the emergency exits in case they have to evacuate a screening room. The cleaning teams use these, too. Nothing very exciting here, but it does give access to an elevator I want to take.”

They reached the lift, and Gonzalez punched in his code. It was a tiny thing compared to the one that took workers to their jobs, but it was luxurious, and fast.

Jessica looked around. Her face fell. “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

“Not yet. And if I can help it, not at all. But it’s still not time to talk about it.” He wouldn’t have put it past his coworkers to have bugged the management elevator if they suspected senior employees might be in on this.

They quickly reached the three hundredth level and, ignoring her questions, Gonzalez pulled her through the halls. The last thing he wanted was to run into Qian Lei—even on assignment, Gonzalez doubted he would allow himself to be packed into worker’s quarters—so he avoided the direct route to the landing tube for a slightly roundabout way that didn’t cut straight through the apartment quarters.

“Through here,” he told her.

They were in a concrete tube ten stories high and maybe twenty meters across, open at the top to keep the strong winds that blasted the building nearly a mile in the air from sending them flying. A flyer sat in the middle of it, much to his relief. His own flyer.

“Where are you taking me?”

“I need to get some things.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Should you be?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

Gonzalez sighed. He really hadn’t had a lot of hope, but whatever had been left was gone. “No, you’re not. You can come if you want and go back if you don’t. It will be better if you come with me.”

She looked into his eyes, nodded once, and followed him into the flyer. Gonzalez punched the directions for his apartment, and off they went. He just hoped Qian Lei hadn’t assigned anyone to monitor his movements or his assets. If he had, they would find quite a welcoming committee on the other end.

To Gonzalez’s relief, there was no one waiting when they landed, a mere two minutes after takeoff. They’d only gone a couple of miles, onto the flyer tube of a building identical to the one they’d left, but he felt safer already. This was his building, after all, and anyone trying to come get him here would have to go through security systems that had been designed to be accessible only to a paranoid control freak… Gonzalez himself.

Jessica seemed to be in shock. She followed without a word as they entered another lift that led to his level.

A quick scan confirmed that there was no one inside his apartment, so Gonzalez keyed the door, and they entered. A stunning view into the night greeted them from the windows but disappeared when he keyed the lights.

“This apartment… It’s so beautiful. And so big. Who lives here?”

His heart sank. He’d thought she’d guessed the plot, but evidently not. “I do.”

“You…” She looked around. “Oh, god. I’m screwed.”

“I already told you, not if I can help it. But I need you to be honest with me. You’re one of the core thieves, aren’t you?”

“Thief? Not at all. I just carry them out of the building sometimes. I can put it in the hollow of my arm, and the guys at the scanners just wave me through.”

“Like every other Greeter with computerized prosthetics.”

“Exactly.”

Gonzalez chuckled at the irony. The company paid for each and every one of those prostheses. It was both a gesture of goodwill toward communities, and a PR stunt to show that the prosthetics—designed and marketed by GCM—were really as effective as the sales materials said they were. And the Greeters had found a way to use that to their advantage.

What surprised him was that Jessica wasn’t apologetic and didn’t seem in the least contrite about what she’d done. Her expression, on the contrary, seemed to be challenging him to question it.

“Why?” he asked. It was a genuine question, not a challenge.

She sighed. “We hate being Greeters. We’re the circus freaks of the arcology. Everyone knows about us. Even little children stare at us to see if they can spot the machinery. We all know without GCM, we’d be starving in some back alley, some of us suffering or immobile, but we don’t have to be happy about it.” She paused. “And the people who run the show know that, unlike everyone else, we’re not accumulating any savings. We are compensated in room and board until we pay back our enhancements. But with the money from the cores… well, at least I could buy a little beer.” She held his gaze. “Now tell me who you are.” Betrayal warred with worry in her eyes, and his heart broke to see it.

“I’m the guy who can get you out of China before the company tosses your butt in jail, along with everyone else involved,” he told her. “But apart from that, I work for the security crew. They sent me in to check on the core thefts.”

“To check on me. On us, the Greeters.”

“No. No one had any idea the Greeters were involved in any way until I realized the alarms went off every time one of you crossed a sensor. It was the perfect cover. If you need to know what I was actually doing, it’s a lot less exciting. I got sent in to build cores in the factory with a crew that had had some inventory anomalies. My job was to catch them taking something, or to get invited into the ring. I’m glad I caught them at it, because getting them to trust me could have taken months. After that, it was a question of seeing how they got the goods out of the factory… and then out of the building. My report will be turned in in an hour. I suspect there won’t be any arrests for a few months, though. The company is much more interested in following the stream back to the source. If we grab anyone now, we’ll spook the higher-ups.”

“I don’t know what any of that means for me.”

“It means that you can go back to your job, and you’ll have plenty of time to escape before the other shoe drops.”

“Escape? Where can I go? I don’t have a cent to my name, other than a tab in the tunnels, paid for by the guys I give the cores to. If I resign, the company will remove my implant. I have nowhere to go.”

“I can help with that. How about coming with me?”

“What… how…”

“You do recall taking the flyer between the buildings, right?”

“That flyer is yours?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. A flyer. I thought only billionaires had those.”

“Not really. There wouldn’t be so many of them about if that was true.”

“So, not only are you security, you’re also stinking rich. Anything else I should know about you before you send me back to wait for them to arrest me and remove my hand?”

That hurt. “Yeah. The email sending my report that busts the whole thing wide open is timed for about an hour from now, and the other email contains my resignation letter. I’m leaving MCG effective now.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I have to fly you out of China. If you’ll come.”

She looked into his eyes long and hard. “You actually mean it, don’t you?”

“Do you want to see the letter?”

A tear formed in Jessica’s eye. “No. For some reason, I always believe everything you say. I know you’ve lied to me since the beginning, but I still do.”

Gonzalez looked around at the spare, minimalist decoration. No ornaments anywhere, a perfect expression of good taste. There was nothing here that he would miss. Five years of his life gone, with nothing but a massive bank account to show for it, and the conviction that a life of corporate management just wouldn’t make him happy. He’d tried. He really had. But it just wasn’t him.

“I need to tell you something,” he said. “My name’s not Gonzalez. It’s Brown, and I’m a little more than just a security expert. This job was a cover for some other stuff I do… and maybe an attempt to escape my former life. I didn’t do so good.”

“So, another lie.” She shrugged. “Well, no one calls me Jessica, anyway. The people who know me best call me Akane. And if you’d only given me a few more months, I would have been the one taking you out of here into a different life.”

The name seemed familiar, as if he should know it, from his life before he tried to go corporate. It tugged at his subconscious… and it had dangerous associations.

“If you’re coming, we leave now.”

“Where?”

“I’ve heard Rio de Janeiro is nice this time of year.”

“But won’t they come after us?”

“I doubt it. I did my job. You’re not wanted for anything by the police, are you?”

“Not that the police know of.”

“Good, then all of this, though irregular, is perfectly legal and above board. Besides, I already told you—they don’t want to alert anyone. If they ignore us, it will just look like a manager fell for an employee and ran off with her. If they look into it… it might look bad to someone who knows what they’re looking for.” He looked into her eyes. “So, are you coming or not?”

She kissed him. “Lead the way.”

* * * * *

Chapter 2

Hong Kong, China – Three Years Later

The door hissed and clanked before it opened. One day, it would refuse to budge, and he’d have to call in the locksmith and his welding torch. But not today. Today, the two-inch-thick piece of scratched gray armor plating ground upward into its slot.

Brown sighed. His apartment smelled of last week’s tofu and yesterday’s fish. He dropped heavily onto the couch facing the kitchenette and toggled the screen without bothering to turn on the lights. Still an hour before dusk, anyway.

Fucking Russians, he thought. Think they can backdoor their way into any system. Well, they won’t come sniffing around CrunchCom for a while. Not after the way we bitch-slapped them.

He wished he could have seen the fuckers’ faces when the guys in the black balaclavas had come in through the windows.

The hackers had been amateurs, of course. No professional in his right mind would come after the Crunch. But even amateur incursions meant you had to backtrack, rip through their attempts at hiding their tracks, and eventually locate their dingy little hidey-hole so the troops could take them away. Sixteen fucking hours and the processing power of two quantum machines.

He was slammed. The bed was six feet away, but the way he felt right then, it might as well have been on the moon. He was too tired to grab the tequila out of the freezer. The screen was showing something, one of the porn channels. People with abnormal surgeries were moving energetically, but he was too zoned to care. He’d only turned it on to get a little more light in there anyway.

A flutter caught his eye, something out of place, notable even in the mess of his tiny habitacle.

There.

A square of paper sat on the floor. He’d been too tired to notice it when he’d come in, but there it was, right where he couldn’t miss it, about two meters from the door.

“I wish she wouldn’t show off.” The door was on a triple-encoded password that changed depending on the day and the date. It couldn’t be forced, and breaking it down required a plasma cutter. Even in his state, he’d have noticed that.

The square had two words and a number on it.

Puta Mierda. 2230.

He glanced at the clock on the entertainment set. He still had a couple of hours, so he set the alarm for 10:00 pm and fell asleep to the soothing sounds of an orgy in a morgue that emanated from the TV.

He changed his shirt to one that didn’t have sixteen hours of tension on it and took a quick look in the mirror as he relieved himself. All the studs and tats were present and accounted for, and since he’d fallen asleep sitting down, the hair didn’t need any attention. At least the half of his head that had hair; the right half didn’t.

He pocketed a pair of brass knuckles and was out the door a moment later.

The Puta Mierda was a bar in the Yua Ma Tei neighborhood on Canton road. Brown had been there before. It was long and thin, painted black, with a stage on one end, and a bar on the other. It would be packed on a Wednesday night.

Everyone knew what the name meant, but the authorities weren’t going to raid a spot that paid its bribes on time, or one that brought in the tourist yuan and dollars by the fistful.

The Hong Kong night was warm and bright. Neon burned from every surface, reflecting on the plastic motorbikes, on the people packed on the street, on the Day-Glo-clad prostitutes pouting from doorways. He squinted until his eyes got used to the glare.

Within minutes, sweat fused his shirt to his body, but Brown ignored it. It would be much worse in the club.

Though it was still early, just after the allotted time, there was already a bouncer at the door. Whatever was planned for that night would likely get a bit hairy, but Brown had no trouble, a single look told the guy at the door that he was part of the scene; both the ink and the studs were right. He was in, unchallenged.

Akane intercepted him almost before he was all the way inside. “You’re late,” she said, frowning down on him from atop tall platform shoes she didn’t need.

He looked her up and down, taking his time, both because he knew it would annoy her, and because it was worth it. Black leather covered everything, jacket and pants. Under the open jacket, she was wearing something made of black mesh with nothing under it. He let his eyes linger there. Akane was better in the legs department—they were long and thin—and a bit underdeveloped in the chest, so she liked it when people looked there. Short hair, cropped and tinted dark black, set off pale white skin and completed the look. She’d defected from the Ravemash scene and still affected the style.

For a second, he wished they were still together, but that bridge hadn’t just burned. It had been nuked from orbit. “What’s the rush?”

Akane shrugged. “Elephant Woman wants you onstage.”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“I don’t think she gives a shit. Now, move.”

Brown followed Akane through the crowd that was already starting to get thick. Everyone knew who she was; the crowd parted in front of her like she was a crap singer trying to crowdsurf.

The Elephant Woman sneered at him. “Brown, about time you got here,” she said. She hadn’t even bothered to shave, and her five o’clock shadow was thicker than any beard Brown could grow in three days. They didn’t call her the Elephant Woman for nothing… legend had it that her trunk was awe-inspiring.

“I’m not going up there. We’ve been over this before.”

“I’ll give you back your bass.”

Crap. She had him by the nuts. Even if he never played on stage again, the bass was worth a month’s salary in Hong Kong. He sighed. “What’s the setup?”

“Slyme from Paranoid tried to mix Crabble and Coke. Didn’t agree with him, and now he’s in Evangel, full of tubes.”

He was stunned. Paranoid were from the Philippines, and they were the biggest Hardgrind act anywhere. But there was another problem. “Slyme is the fucking singer. Forget it.”

“Ratsass will do the singing. I’m half-convinced he poisoned the other asshole so he could take his place.”

“How long?”

“Forty minutes. We’re not charging for entry. Paranoid wanted to play this joint because of its reputation.”

“Shit.” That meant the place would be packed, and the crowd would be drunk or flying. They’d also be pissed when they saw Slyme wasn’t on stage, although how many of them would actually realize it, he wasn’t sure. “Your security pukes are gonna have a lousy night.”

“That’s what I pay them for.”

They gave him half an hour to study the sheet music—what there was of it—and he decided to keep it simple. The band never played a song the same way twice, anyhow. They were generally even more stoned than the audience. The audience would be paying more attention to the guitars and the singer anyway. He just needed to stay in the background and try to keep up. Any mistakes he made would fit right in.

He’d played the Hong Kong scene before. Crowds were always the same: a mix of gangsters who didn’t give a shit about the message, but who liked the edge; locals who got the scene; and people off the ships who’d heard about the five or six places near the port where one could hear punk like it was meant to be heard. The one thing every crowd had in common was that you had to watch them like a hawk—Brown had learned that lesson the previous year, when a urine-filled glass had smashed into his chest.

Ratsass ignored Brown and looked at the bass. “Nice. I guess you might actually know what you’re doing. We’ll start with ‘Fuck Beijing’ and see how that goes down before moving on. I’ll cue you, but be ready to change tunes in the middle of things. We’re probably going to close with ‘Feminist Ass is Better,’ but I ain’t promising anything.”

Brown sighed. There were newer things to protest, stuff closer to the nerve, but Paranoia hadn’t made it to the top by taking risks. They knew how to get a reaction out of most people, and the rage in the mainstream press was enough to keep them legit… for now.

It was easier than he expected. A couple of bottles flew when Slyme failed to show, but overall, the crowd was well-behaved. It was only midnight, still early, which probably accounted for it.

The set went much too quickly. He’d really missed the energy, missed the noise, missed looking down on the crowd. By the time the last chords of “Feminist Ass” faded, he was covered in sweat from head to toe without really knowing how it had happened. The air conditioning in the back room hit him hard.

“Good job, mate,” Ratsass said, thumping him on the back. “Didn’t miss a beat.”

Brown knew that wasn’t true. He’d missed plenty, but so had they. More than he had, in fact.

The third member of the band—a Masai girl with pink hair and jet-black skin who went by the name Other Guitar—just nodded her respect and walked to a table with a couple of needles on it. She shot up in silence, one after the other, and then collapsed onto a couch. The drummer hadn’t even bothered coming back with them. The last Brown had seen of him, he was fondling a groupie who’d made it onto the stage.

“Thanks for letting me join in.”

Ratsass waved and wandered off. Akane intercepted him again. “Admit it. You loved every minute of it.”

“Fuck off, Akane.”

She smirked. “Come on. Elly wants to talk.” Elly was short for Elephant Woman, and the use of the diminutive made the hair on his neck stand on end. He was beginning to suspect he wasn’t there to play the bass.

“How long have you been working for her?”

“Just tonight.”

“Must be paying you pretty well. It couldn’t have been easy to get through my door.”

“Of course it was. Civilian tech.”

The last part of the conversation was shouted. They were back in the main room, and another band, some locals Brown knew reasonably well, were riding the euphoria Paranoia had left among the crowd. They were loud and probably better than the Filipinos.

Akane led him to another private room, this one on a metal platform reached by climbing a mesh staircase behind the largest bouncer Brown had ever seen. The man was way off his turf; the shiny black suit made him look like a Yakuza thug who’d overdosed on some kind of growth potion. Brown’s eyes looked into his chest until he moved aside to let them pass.

“That was pretty good, for a retired guy.” The Elephant Woman grunted. “You could make a decent living with those guys, and make their music better, too.”

“They don’t need a session musician, not even a session musician who’s more punk at heart than they’ll ever be.”

She grunted again. “You’re probably right. Now, to business.”

“I thought I was here to play a set and get my bass back.”

“How’d you like to pay off your indenture to CrunchCom, instead?”

Shit. Whatever she wants is going to be either dangerous or illegal. Hell, there’s no way it will be one or the other. It’s gonna be both.

“What’s it about?” he said. He really wanted out from under the indenture, which had been the result of one of Akane’s harebrained schemes gone particularly wrong. Wrong enough that it had poisoned what they’d once had.

“Naughty, naughty,” Elly replied. “You know that isn’t how it works. Either you agree, and we do a deal right now, or you walk, and I get someone else.”

“All right, just answer this. Will there be people shooting at me?”

“Not unless you fuck up.”

That was about par for the course. The kind of work he did happened in the shadows. You were only caught when you failed.

He sighed. “Fuck. Deal me in.”

“I thought you’d see it my way.” Elly pulled aside some cushions, and what he’d taken for a couch turned out to be a low table holding an optical quantum portable.

“Nice piece of kit. How the hell did you get that in here without tipping everyone off?”

“We stashed it with the drums. No one cared.”

Brown remembered the muscle down at the bottom of the stairs and reassessed his take. Not Yakuza. Triad. Only the Chinese could lay their hands on equipment like that and get it into Hong Kong without raising eyebrows.

Elly went on. “Can you use it?”

“Depends on what you want me to do.”

“You see that guy down there? The one in the white suit?”

Thin guy. Much too pure-blooded to be local. Straight from Beijing was Brown’s guess. “Yeah. He looks kinda familiar.”

“He should. That’s Zhang Wei the Kevin.”

“That’s the Kevin? I… I thought he was from Hong Kong.”

“He is, but oh-so-upper-class. No foreigners in his family. Only the British enclave is more racist than his ancestors.”

“Hmm. OK, what about him?”

“He hasn’t been playing ball.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Brown, don’t act dumb. You know what I mean. He owns this joint. We do business here. He does business here, with the permission of the people who give permission for that sort of thing. But he isn’t donating what he should for that privilege.”

“So what? Have the guy guarding the stairs tear him to pieces. I’m pretty sure that would be easy enough. I still don’t see what you need me for.”

“He’s got implants.”

Brown looked closer. Of course, there was no way to tell from here. Visible in-skull implants were a good way of getting hacked. There was just no way to pack the necessary hardware to run decent security and encryption into the space available. Most people he knew still had the scars from implant removal after the big hack seven years ago. “He can’t be that dumb.”

“It appears he is. Dumber even. He’s been relying on the fact that no one knows he has them. The doctors were quietly put down, and his maintenance team is all part of his family. Also, he thinks it’s one of those questions no one will ever think to ask. Hiding in plain sight and all that. He thinks his secret is safe forever.”

“But someone talked.”

Elly nodded. “Someone always talks. So the thing is, there are some people in Shanghai who want him taken care of, but first, they want to know everything he knows.”

“I can do that.”

“Good.” She pressed the enter key. “You’ve just been paid. Do it.”

“Here?”

“I’m not letting you out of my sight until it’s done. Under the circumstances, would you? How long would it take you to transfer your slave fee to the Crunch and disappear on me? Four minutes?”

He grinned at her. “Less. All right, let’s see what this thing can do.”

Brown looked at the screen. Someone at CrunchCom had been naughty. The setup mirrored his own profile at the data center, right down to the blinking green cursor that no one else used. He tapped in a pair of commands and opened two hunter programs. These would hack into nearby cell towers from their own backend and see who or what was sending and receiving data through them.

Seconds later, hundreds of hits scrolled across the screen. “And that, people, is why you never do anything important over a mobile device.”

“Is he there?”

“Probably. Give me a minute.” He opened another program—one he’d written himself that should never, ever have been on that particular machine—and waited as it began to do its stuff. Items on the list turned yellow, then red. Others stubbornly did nothing. Those were the ones that would need further investigation.

Finally, he was left with only two unknowns. “The rest of them are handheld phones. We can ignore them.” He looked at the two remaining lines. “So let’s see where these two are.”

“How?”

“I’ll try triangulation first. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to hack into both until we find some kind of personally identifying information.”

Triangulation worked, of course. Two points were overlaid on a plan of the building they were in. One of the locations was unmistakably the Kevin. The other… Brown quickly deleted the second and pointed to the positive hit. “There. That one.”

“OK, can you get in?” Elly asked.

“Sure. How much damage am I allowed to do?”

“Brown, this guy is stealing from the Triad. If you boil his brain, no one is going to care.”

“I meant to the files. How much data loss is acceptable? If I go brute force at his defenses, he might have subroutines in place to scrub sensitive data. If we try to finesse it, he might realize something’s up. Your call; I’m fine either way.”

The Elephant Woman screwed up her face in concentration, and her eyes unfocused. “Tear it a new asshole,” she said at last.

“You got it.” He hit the command that first took control of the cell antennas, and then would launch codebreaking at the implants. Considering that even the best implants were five years old, and even back then, they were eminently hackable, the security should be reasonably quick to fall.

He hoped it would be over soon. The people in this room weren’t particularly addicted to bathing, and they were all tense. Brown knew he didn’t smell much better. He was carrying twenty sweaty hours with him.

Just then, Zhang Wei the Kevin jumped as if he’d been hit with a cattle prod. He looked dazed for a few seconds, but then, due either to intuition or just crap luck, he looked up at the balcony room to see a bunch of people staring down at him. He evidently put two and two together and came up with an imaginary number, because he started yelling orders. A big bunch of goons headed for the stairs.

The balcony-dwellers’ own Triad-issue giant acquitted himself well to start off with. The first guy who approached him, knife in hand, received a blow to the jaw that sent teeth and blood flying all over the place. Then he reached into his black jacket, clearly going for a gun.

He never made it. Dark blotches appeared on his lapels, and a slack expression on his face, and he keeled over. No one in the crowd seemed to notice; people keeled over in the Puta Mierda as a matter of course… and the music was much too loud for gunfire to be heard.

“Shit, here he comes,” Elly said. “Akane, you packing?”

“Always.”

Brown looked at the skintight pants and wondered where she’d shoved a gun, but Akane simply bent over and tore off one of her platforms. Concealed within was a needle shooter, not flashy, useless at long range or against armor… but perfect for what they needed. She took cover in the door frame and began to make life miserable for any of the Kevin’s goons who tried to come up the stairs. Her needles weren’t deadly, unless she aimed really well, but having a two-inch spike buried in your lungs tended to distract even the tough guys.

“Brown, you’d better think of something. I’ve got five rounds left.”

He grinned despite the prospect of at least a bad beating heading up the stairs at him. The data transfer was done, and he was essentially in command of the Kevin’s implants, so he began to see what they were connected to.

He shook his head. You had to be a real moron to do your banking from implants. How could a career gangster be so simpleminded? Well, there was no time to rob him blind. He needed something better.

There. The control system for the intelligent lights that illuminated the stage. Brown sent them into a frenzy, overriding the safety warnings as soon as they came on, and working them to the overheating point. Soon, the lights were sparking, and a couple of them caught fire.

“Is that the best you can do?” Elly yelled. “They’re going to be here any minute.”

A couple of people in the crowd noticed that the stage had gone dark, but most were oblivious. The little flames in the lights fifteen feet above people’s heads also wasn’t as impressive as he wanted.

He was going to die.

And then, born of desperation, realization hit—he’d been going in the wrong direction. Instead of more light, what the place needed was less. He cut the power to the club.

Darkness enveloped everything. The only illumination came from the console in front of him—still a couple of hours of battery life remaining—and, ironically, the little flames around the lights. Absent the distorted guitars, the silence was deafening.

But it lasted only a second.

What had been a loud, boisterous mass of humanity, perched on the perfect punk precipice between enjoyment and violence, tipped over the edge.

Shouts became yells; yells became screams. People began to rush one way and the other, the movements Dantesque in the flickering glow as the masses of the damned turned upon one another.

“They’ve stopped coming!” Akane shouted.

“Yeah, they’re probably trying to extricate the Kevin before he gets his ass trampled,” Brown replied, trying to make sense of the scene below. All he got was a sense of mayhem and death.

The Elephant Woman materialized at his left shoulder. “Overheat the implants,” she said.

“That would kill him,” Brown replied. “No one said anything about murder.”

“You said you’d do the job.” For emphasis, she put a fingernail on his neck. No. Not a fingernail. The point of the stiletto she was rumored to carry between her boobs.

Brown found himself, despite the urgency of the situation, wondering why she’d had her tits done while leaving the boy bits down under. It seemed weird.

The point dug a little into the flesh of his neck. “Are you going to do the job or not?”

“Yes. Wait.” Brown typed the command to put the implants into overdrive, but he added a line of code that told it to cut off after a few seconds. The Kevin wouldn’t die by his hand, but he’d have a hell of a headache, if he wasn’t trampled. He’d probably never be able to think straight again, either, but that was his own lookout. Brown wasn’t averse to hurting people when his nuts were in a vice—just to killing them. “It’s done.”

Elly looked down into the crowd. “Shit,” she concluded. “I guess I’m gonna have to take your word for it.” The pressure of the knife disappeared.

“I guess you are,” Brown replied. “Where are you going?”

“Backstage. I left a bunch of stuff in there. I wasn’t expecting you to set off a riot.”

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” But Brown was already getting up. He only paused for a few seconds to pay off his indenture with the money he’d gotten for the job. Elly clearly had some serious clout inside Crunch. No use letting her use that to stop the payment. He didn’t want to give her time to think.

“You’re coming to help? How gallant,” Akane said.

“Gallant, shit. I’m not gonna lose that bass again.”

The thin girl chuckled. Despite her own attempts to desexualize herself through haircut and clothes, she was pretty when she smiled. Of course, she was also in the pay of every criminal organization on the Pacific. No one was perfect.

The initial panic in the main hall had died down. People with handheld phones—Brown shuddered at the security risks inherent in that awful habit—were using them as flashlights and heading for the exits.

But the damage had been done. Trampled bodies and soon-to-be-bodies-if-medical-help-didn’t-arrive-soon littered the floor. The tabloid sites would get good traffic tomorrow.

They made it to the back room without incident. It was trashed, but the case in which Brown had stashed the bass after the gig, though dented, had done its job. He shouldered it and turned for the door.

A hand grabbed his ankle. He looked down to see the bloody features of Zhang Wei looking up from the floor. Hatred and accusation burned from the man, who’d clearly been run over by a large crowd. A thin stream of blood flowed from his nose, and the arm not holding Brown’s pants extended at an awkward angle.

Brown shook him off, and Akane looked down.

“Elly,” she said. “Here’s something for your bosses. A bit broken, and with a fried brain, but still serviceable as an example.”

“I thought I told you to kill him,” she said.

“I tried. Bugger must be tougher than he looks.”

“All right. Get out of here. You, too, Akane. Cops will be here in seconds, and I don’t trust you guys to keep your mouths shut.”

Akane looked like she was about to protest, but Brown dragged her out by the elbow. “You don’t want to be there for what happens next,” he told her.

She grunted. “Easy for you to say. Your indenture is paid off. I’ve still got a couple years on my latest debt. Getting in good with Elly’s people might cut some time off it.”

“Yeah, it might cut some time off your life, too.”

“I never thought you’d go all health-and-safety on me, Brown.”

“Yeah, and I notice you didn’t say I was wrong.”

They walked for a few minutes without speaking. A light drizzle fell, but the crowds were still thick.

Finally, Akane broke the silence. “Are you taking me to your pad?”

“It had crossed my mind.”

“Always so romantic. When was the last time you got laid?”

“You should know. You were there.”

She whistled. “That long?”

“Yeah. Been kinda tied up at work.” He hoped she didn’t read too much into it.

They walked. Brown thought about what he’d learned that night. The Elephant Woman had implants. He’d seen there was a set in the cabin with them, and then when she went blank on him, he’d quickly put two and two together. She was receiving orders from her higher-ups. That was knowledge he might be able to use to spy on her operations, and maybe keep an eye on Akane, warn her if things were going to get rough.

“Where are you heading to?” she asked after a couple of blocks of silence. She knew as well as he did that Hong Kong was going to be too hot to handle once word got out about who did the number on the Kevin. And word always got out.

“Bangkok.”

“Ooh. Good scene.”

“Yeah. And I can get work from the Corporate Occupation Office. They’re always offering decent contracts for anyone out of indenture, and they kill Triad members on sight as soon as they land. You might want to pop over when your time is done.”

She looked at him, her piercing brown eyes trying to pierce his veil of indifference. “I might almost think you want to see me again.”

Brown shrugged. She was a hell of a lot smarter than she let on.

“Up to you, really. I need to be out of here by tomorrow morning.”

“You’re not going to get much rest.”

“Good. I need to work off this adrenaline.” He hoped she couldn’t tell he was lying.

* * * * *

Chapter 3

Bangkok, Thailand – Ten Months Later

Miriam leaned over the bar and held his gaze. Cigarette smoke and strobe lights framed her face, putting it in the brightest of lights and the deepest of shadows.

“Explain to me again, slowly this time, why you want me to buy this whore for you. You can afford her yourself, can’t you?”

“She’s not a whore,” Brown replied.

“No matter what she was before, she’s a whore now. Once they’re roboed, they can’t say no to anything, as long as the checking account of the guy asking has the price in it.”

Brown grunted. He knew all that. No matter how much he wanted it to be untrue, there was nothing he could do about it… other than to make sure she was somewhere he could keep an eye on her.

Miriam wasn’t a total bitch. As brothel owners went, she was a complete angel. But she was hard-nosed and tough, and wouldn’t allow herself to be sucked into something that didn’t concern her. “What is she, some old girlfriend?”

“More like the little sister I never had.”

The mCyrano snorted. She wasn’t much more than thirty, but Brown felt like she could see right through him. “You actually expect me to believe that story?”

“I guess not. Look, she was never really a girlfriend, and she really is someone I want to take care of.”

“Never really a girlfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“You do know she’ll be worn out completely by the time the bioware gets reabsorbed, don’t you? She’s conscious in there, even if she doesn’t have much control over what she’s doing. Once she gets control of her body back, the first thing she’ll do is cut the nearest guy up with a razor for what the men before him did to her. Do you really want it to be you?”

“I’ll risk it.”

She looked around. “You know how much I’ve made from this place in five years?”

“No.”

“I’ve made enough that I’m going to be retiring to a very large plantation house in Borneo as soon as my visa comes through. I’ll be taking my entire family.” She paused to look around the dance floor, where young ladies wearing nothing but strings of pearls, and young men wearing even less—only strategically placed rings—showed off the house wares. “And most of the people who work for me only last a couple of tourist seasons before they use their winnings to set up their own businesses, or finish college, or whatever. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because all of you stupid gringos are too dumb to pick someone up in a bar without having to pay through the nose for it.”

“This is different. I won’t touch her until the circuitry is reabsorbed.”

That was the only cure for the bioware, just to wait. A year, two years. Eventually, the body’s immune system broke down the biocircuitry controlling it… but if you tried to pull it out before its time, all you got was a dead body and the smell of cooking brains.

“All right. Whatever. Now tell me why you just can’t buy her yourself.”

“They know me. They know if I bought her, my only command would be to tell her to find a beach somewhere and relax until she’s feeling herself again.”

“And why would that be bad? They get their money either way.”

That was usually the way things worked with white slavers… but this was a special case. “She’s not some junkie who got in over her head. She’s being punished.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

That earned him a look.

“No, really. I actually don’t know. She probably did something to annoy one of the Triads enough to robo her, but not kill her; a warning to herself and others. Hell, I was there a couple of times when she did something that would have gotten her killed on the spot if she’d been caught, so it can’t have been anything too serious in comparison.”

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this.”

“I already told you. I’ll pay for it. All you have to do is put her to work in the cathouse.”

Miriam laughed. “Remind me never to ask you to rescue me from anything.”

Brown shrugged. “I can’t do any better than this. The Triads are going to be checking up on her, and if she isn’t working her debt off on her back, they’re going to ask some pointed questions using pointed objects.”

“I can do without the hassle.”

“It’s free money, Miriam. No one will hassle you. Hassling the clients is bad for business.”

“I’m going to pass.”

Brown cursed inwardly. He didn’t want to do this. “The girl is Akane.”

“Akane? The Akane?”

“Yeah.”

“You should have said so before. Every hacker and two-bit goon in Bangkok is going to want a piece of her, and they’ll all pay top crypto for the privilege. She’s probably done more harm to netjockey pride and pocketbooks than any dozen ex-girlfriends. Hell, if you hadn’t already offered to pay, I’d foot the bill myself. I can just fire all the rest of these losers—” she pointed at the beautiful naked people who’d already made her a wealthy woman “—and run the place on what she brings in.” She gave him a hard look. “You aren’t going to flake on me, are you? They’re going to ride her hard, and she’ll probably get filmed and show up all over the net. You cool with that?”

“No, I’m not. I’m going to hate every fucking second of it. But I have a feeling if we don’t make it look good, if the folks who did this to her don’t think she’ll be scarred for life, they’re going to cut her into cubes… and it’s going to take her a hell of a long time to die. So I’ll play along.”

Miriam nodded. Right answer. “Do you have the deepnet address?”

He gave it to her.

“Why’d you choose me?” she said once the transaction was complete.

“Security,” he replied. “No one is going to get in here unless you let them—or unless they’re carrying enough ordnance that it wouldn’t have made any difference where I stashed her anyway.”

“I thought as much.”

* * *

For such an important group of assholes, the Corporate Occupation Office had crappy security. He’d seen it happen before; hotshot programmers break into some high-profile target, go to jail for a bit, and then come back as millionaire consultants. Except these guys had gotten out of Europe and set up their company in Thailand before the cops knocked down their doors.

Now, like every single group before them, the original members had lost their edge, and they hired guys like Brown to do their dirty work for them. The founders saw a lot more money than code these days, and he’d discovered a couple of loopholes big enough to drive an elephant through.

But even though the mainframes were now pretty well buttoned, that didn’t stop everyone and his kid brother from trying to make a name for themselves by breaking in and fucking shit up. His job was to keep them out. Of course, that was in addition to the several flavors of denial-of-service attacks that were always going on against the open site. That was what it was there for, after all—to keep the noobs from attacking the real service hubs. As long as loading times stayed reasonable, and no one got their message on the site, he didn’t pay too much attention to the frontend, though. He had enough trouble keeping the pros out of the back.

And… off duty. His screen went blank in the middle of a keystroke. That was the way COO kept their own employees from freelancing. Their hours were staggered, their assignments duplicated, and they had no way to communicate with one another. They were cogs in a machine… and COO never let you forget it.

Brown got up. He had three minutes to get out of the cubicle he’d been randomly assigned that day. Once that time was up, the door would lock, and he’d likely get to have an unpleasant interview with the physical security team.

He’d met that particular group of goons already when being screened for the job. They weren’t fun, so he left quickly. He walked through the EMP scanner. If he’d had any electronics stashed anywhere inside his body, maybe something recording the tells from his computer’s magnetic fields, now was the time he would develop a nasty ulcer laced with all sorts of mercury byproducts as the circuits overloaded and melted. Getting radiated every day probably wasn’t too good for his chances of not ever getting cancer, but the company was paying him enough to have nanotreatment insurance.

The room where his clothes were stored was right at the end of the hall, and the locker opened as he walked in. He removed the overalls he was assigned when he came in, stood naked for the cameras for a few seconds, then gave them a rude gesture and dressed. Black jeans, black boots, black shirt. He might be a cliché, but at least he was the right cliché.

Outside, the city was hot and muggy. Brown replayed the information the bioware in his head had gathered about the computer in his office. It had recorded everything his eyes saw, of course, but also much more than that. The workstation was fed via cables, and he’d gotten every residual magnetic signal that went in. He was pretty sure that, after adequate crunching, his own quantum-optical ‘frame could break the codes.

He wasn’t out to break COO. Not yet. They paid him well, and it was a pretty low-stress gig, with reasonable hours. But he couldn’t believe they would overlook bioware as a possibility. An EMP wasn’t going to break a mindplug. They should put up CAT scans with micro resolution.

But they were much too busy resting on their laurels to keep up with the latest news.

He walked into a basement bar. The crowded room smelled of sweat, old beer, and even older vomit, but at least it was dark enough that you couldn’t identify what the sludge you were wading through might be.

Compared to Miriam’s place, it was a dump, but he wasn’t planning to return to Miriam’s for some time. The mCyrano had sent him a vid of her employees unpacking the crate in which the Triad had shipped Akane from Hong Kong. The knowledge that her transgression must have been minor was emphasized by the presence of breathing holes cut into the wood. Still, Miriam would press her into action sooner rather than later, and he didn’t want to watch as she got taken upstairs by one sweaty hacker out for revenge or street cred after another.

This dive’s floor show was typical of the breed. Cyborg girl, whirring gears visible in some areas, and a genetically modified human boy going at it.

He sat at a table near the stage. A big guy appeared to take his order. He was blond in a sea of dark-haired heads, and he didn’t look happy to see him.

“Hi, Grunt,” Brown said. “Caipiroshka.”

“Told you not to call me that. Good vodka, or the crappy stuff?”

“You don’t make a caipiroshka with good vodka. You should know that by now. And besides, everyone in Bangkok knows your story. Why bother trying to hide anymore?”

“The US may be a long way away, but it’s armed to the teeth. They don’t like defectors, and they have a long reach, that’s why. And you should know that.”

That didn’t sound like the usual fatalistic banter. “Hey… what’s wrong today?”

“There were some guys asking about you.”

He shrugged. People looked him up for jobs all the time, and this was one of his watering holes. “So what?”

“These guys were suffering from some pretty fucked-up cyanosis.”

“Say what?”

“They had blue hands, Brown. Now, do me a favor, and finish your drink quickly when it comes. Then get out. I don’t want to clean up your blood.”

“You guys clean?”

“Very funny.”

He returned a couple of minutes later with a glass full of vodka, crushed ice, and lime. He’d forgotten the sugar, which sucked, but it had arrived in record time. Most days, Grunt made him wait, and didn’t appear until Brown had given the act a tip.

They’d put the good vodka in it, probably by mistake, but Grunt’s warning had poisoned Brown’s mood. He drank quickly, transferred some credits to the bar by laying his phone, approval-code down, onto the table scanner, and got up to leave. A hand on his shoulder prevented it.

“Leaving so soon, Mr. Brown?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes,” he replied, turning to see who was speaking to him. His heart sank when he realized the hand was, even in the awful light, tinged a shade of blue that no one in good health could pull off. He tried to shake the hand away, but its owner was not in the mood to cooperate. “I need to get my bass. I’ve got a gig at the Death of the Church bar.” That part, at least, was true.

“Perhaps you’d better let them know you’ll be late.” The man gave him a prim smile, ghastly on his pale face. “Or maybe it would be best to cancel altogether.”

“Punk managers don’t let you cancel. They come around and cut off your fingers.”

“That would be unfortunate for a man in your profession, wouldn’t it? But in the case of the manager, we are discussing hypotheticals. In our case, we are here, and it is now, and the best thing would be for you to sit back down.”

Brown knew the score. He sat.

Two more of the Blues joined him at the table. One of them was a woman, but such distinctions made little difference once the body had been given over to the unique combination of traditional and biological circuitry that gave the blues their incredible reflexes while, at the same time, consuming too much of the oxygen in their blood… and gifting them their sickly blue tone.

“What do you want?” Brown asked. If they’d wanted him dead, the conversation would have been over already; a hand that could gently grasp a shoulder could just as easily slit a throat. Besides, he hadn’t offended anyone big enough to hire this kind of muscle. At least not recently.

“We need some information.”

That figured. “Is it information I have, or do I need to break into some very strongly protected mainframes to get it for you?”

At this point, the woman pulled a switchblade from somewhere in her clothes and began twirling it about in blurred patterns. Brown found it very distracting.

“You have it. Or at any rate, you can get it for us easily, without any hacking at all.”

It sounded too good to be true. “Tell me.”

“We want certain files back.”

“I’ll need more than that. For example, I’d need to know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t steal files.”

The pale face was impassive. “I never said you did. Your friend Akane took the files.” The man held up a hand. “And before you say you have no idea where she is, let me save you the embarrassment of having to lie to us by telling you that we already know exactly where she is, and how she got there. I wanted to walk in and buy the information from her, but walking in isn’t an option for us… unless we want to start a war. While I’d also be fine with that, it isn’t, unfortunately, my decision.”

“So you want me to ask her for you.”

“Yes. We will give you the money for the information. Fifty SmileBits should be enough.”

Brown whistled. “Or way too much. I didn’t know SmileOrg allowed so many of their coins to group together in one place.” SmileOrg’s product was meant to be used by small-time drug dealers in fractions of a Bit and never accumulated—to keep unwanted attention from law enforcement at bay.

The Blue remained impassive. “We have given you access to the money. If it’s too much, you may use whatever is left at your discretion. Consider it your fee. We hear the lady is in no condition to refuse… maybe you can spend it on her.” The man—Brown was having more and more trouble thinking of him as human—attempted a smile. It came out as a threatening grimace. “But deliver the goods.”

“You still haven’t told me what data, whose data, I’m supposed to recover.”

The woman leaned in. “DragonCat Trading,” she whispered. Her throat, at some point, must have gotten crushed, because she spoke in a hoarse whisper. “We’ll meet you here again in two days. Same time. Don’t be late. Bring the data.”

The three melted into the crowd, leaving Brown shaking. It was partly fear, but mostly anger. Anger at Akane for getting involved in things too big for her—things she couldn’t control, and that inevitably blew up in her face. That was how she’d gone from junior hacker wannabee when he’d met her, to full-fledged millionaire hacker, to indentured wage-slave in Hong Kong, to roboed call girl in Bangkok. Of course, none of the things she’d done before—or at least none of the ones she’d been caught doing—were as big as this.

DragonCat used to be a shell company for a Triad, but rumors said it had been the subject of a hostile takeover orchestrated by, depending on who one believed, a major Yakuza ally, the Russian Mafia, or a combination of the two. If Akane was still alive after taking data they needed, it would only be because someone else had gotten to her and punished her first.

Grunt appeared. “Hey. They didn’t murder you.”

“You should have told me they were still in the bar.”

“Nah. Too risky. Now if you’d order the good vodka every once in a while, it might be worth my while to save you. Do you want another drink?”

“I’d kill for one.”

“Well, if you do, do it outside. I’ll get you another caipi.”

He took ages to return. Only when Brown authorized a microcoin tip for the performers did the second drink show up.

* * *

“I knew you wouldn’t resist her for long, but this is pretty sickening, even by your standards.” Miriam leered at him.

Brown would have liked to defend himself, to say his feelings for Akane were pure, but that might have given more away than he was comfortable with. He needed a few minutes alone with Akane, and this was the way to get it without raising any eyebrows.

“I want the whole night and a decent room, not one of the cubbies.”

That did raise eyebrows. “Not going to be cheap,” she said.

“You’re going to make me pay?”

This time she raised only one eyebrow.

“All right,” Brown replied. He knew he had more than enough funds for it. Miriam’s asking price for the whole shebang—full service everything, including food—came to less than a single SmileBit at the day’s exchange rate. Clearly, the Russians, or the Yakuza, or whoever were expecting the information itself to be expensive.

Miriam nodded. The transfer must have cleared.

“Go on up. She’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He didn’t have to say anything. Muscular, augmented bouncers, who normally just looked at him the way most people would study something smelly stuck to the bottom of their shoe, fell all over themselves, opening doors, and ushering him to what he suspected was the best room in the house, complete with palatial, whirlpool-equipped bathroom, an upstairs bed, a downstairs living area with various couches, a couple of machines that looked suspiciously like the innards of the android girl in Grunt’s bar, and even a small rooftop terrace on which, if you were so inclined, you could have sex in full view of the inhabitants of the high-rise tenements across the alley.

The door opened, and Akane walked in. He was used to seeing her in skintight leather pants and top, and he must have been expecting her to look that way now. He should have known better… and he should have been able to predict that Miriam’s penchant for presentation would extend to her most expensive product.

Perfume wafted after her.

A transparent gauze kimono that left absolutely nothing to the imagination was wrapped over creamy skin, tattoos, and a garter belt holding up a pair of fishnets... and not one other scrap of clothing She looked good, fine-boned face framed by shortish hair—dyed blond now—and tiny breasts that amounted to little more than a bump behind the nipple.

When she saw him, her confident stride faltered.

“You,” she said flatly. “I didn’t think you’d take advantage of… the situation.”

He tossed her a bathrobe from the bed. “You know me too well. Cover yourself up.”

“Yes.”

The word sounded soulless. As she donned the thick terrycloth garment, he watched her. “Are you doing that because I asked you to, or because you wanted to?”

Akane, the Akane he remembered, flashed through. She gave him a wicked smirk. “Because you told me to, of course. If it had been up to me, I’d have sat here, crossing and uncrossing my legs, and watching you sweat.”

“How much of you is still there?”

She grunted, a sound nearly completely incompatible with her dress and the surroundings, not to mention the perfume. “All of me.” She grimaced. “This hasn’t been fun.”

“I’m pretty sure you deserved it.”

“Oh, yeah. But still. You haven’t been humiliated until some pimply noob you made to look like an idiot in front of everyone films you while you do it. I’m just glad Miriam doesn’t give me a phone, or they’d make me post the vids from my own feed. The worst part about it is that normally, I’d beat the crap out of these losers… It would be so easy that I wouldn’t even bother using a knife. But I guess that’s what comes of getting roboed.” She shrugged. “Beats the hell out of the alternative, though.”

“I guess… this is just a couple of years; death is permanent.”

They sat in silence for a while before she gave him a hard look. “If you didn’t hire me to get your fantasies taken care of all in one go, then what the hell are we doing here?”

“I got a visit from some friends of yours.”

“Ah. I thought it would take them longer to find me. How were they?”

“They were blue. I think they were sad they couldn’t get in here to see you.”

“Crap.”

“Care to tell me who sent them?”

“Petrov.”

“Dammit. Why don’t you ever piss off anyone who doesn’t have a thousand goons at their disposal?”

“Actually, I do that, too. I just never felt the need to tell you about it.”

“Fair enough. So these guys want to know where their data is.”

“Technically, it isn’t their data.”

“I could have guessed that. But technically, storming into this building, killing all the girls and their customers, and then ordering you to cut yourself up into small pieces isn’t legal after you give them their info, either. But I don’t think Petrov’s army will care.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she replied.

“The point is, they want to know where you put it.”

“You’d give it to them?”

“Yeah. I like breathing.”

“Well, don’t get too used to it, if that’s your solution. They’re only going to let you stay alive long enough to verify they got what they wanted. It’s too risky to let you keep going once you see what’s in there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bank account numbers and codes.”

“They can change all of that without adding to the body count.”

She shrugged. “They could… but tech junkies are more expensive than hitmen, and who’d shut the tech junkies up afterward?”

“Fuck this!” he shouted.

“Fuck what?”

“The Russians. The Triads. All of them.”

“You’d need to bring them here. I can’t leave the premises. And I’d have to charge you for each one. Your payment so far doesn’t cover more than one person.”

Brown suddenly realized that Akane’s voice had gone flat again. He wasn’t talking to her any more, but to the biocircuitry implanted in her head, the stuff that meant she had to do anything anyone told her to.

He thought about how to explain to her, then shrugged. “Cancel that order. Bring Akane back.”

“I wasn’t actually gone. That’s the worst part of this. I get to live through everything those morons do to me.”

“I hate to say it, but I think that’s the least of your problems right now.”

Anger flashed. “That’s easy for you to say.”

That struck home. “I guess you’re right. I’m sorry. Who did this to you, anyway?”

She looked surprised. “You haven’t figured it out yet?”

“No. Should I have?”

“If you had any brains. I did it to myself.”

“What?” He sat there, slack jawed. Then he slapped his head. “Of course. And you told the Elephant Woman to contact me, knowing I’d get you out from under the Triad’s noses, thinking they’d work you into the ground in some cheap cathouse. All a ruse, I suppose.”

“Actually, no. The Elephant Woman helped, but as far as the Triad knows, I really am being punished.”

“Whatever. How did you know I wouldn’t just buy you for myself?”

“That wouldn’t have been the safest place for me. You wouldn’t have risked it.”

Crap. “How long have you known I would save you if you got in really deep?”

“Since the first time we slept together after you learned I wasn’t just a Greeter. You should have seen yourself. Puppy dog doesn’t come close to describing it.”

“And you gambled everything on that? That I’d do the right thing?”

“It’s not like I had a whole bunch of choices. Petrov isn’t happy with me.”

“So where’d you stash his codes? I assume they’ve already got your machine.”

“Probably, but they weren’t in there. I put them in the Corporate Occupation Office mainframe.”

Of course, he thought. “You broke into COO.” It wasn’t a question.

“Sure, why not? You always leave a few loopholes open, so I used those. I trust you have some backdoors?”

“Nothing reliable.”

“Then they’re going to kill you.”

“Not if I run for South America first.”

“They might still kill you.”

“So, they’ll kill me if I give them what they want, and kill me if I don’t.”

“Yep.”

“And you brought me into this… why, exactly?”

“To save my ass.” She looked at the lushly carpeted floor. “I know it was a shitty thing to do, but I was scared.” The admission was more than he’d ever seen from her. Akane loved to play with fire, and anyone who accused her of being scared was likely to get a stiletto boot to the groin. “Can’t you think of any way to stop these guys?”

“The Russians? Much more powerful people than I have already tried and failed. You can recognize them by the bullet holes in the back of their heads.”

“Maybe not the entire Mafia. Maybe just the three blue goons.”

That gave him pause. Neutralizing the immediate threat might buy him some time. Blues were notorious for doing things their own way… he wasn’t an expert, but the rumors said the Blues were regular humans who had essentially abandoned their bodies, their minds had been uploaded onto large computers somewhere, they gave their near-autonomous bodies instructions through the network… and they didn’t communicate with the people who hired them except to tell them the job was done. It was conceivable that the Russians didn’t even know Brown was involved in any way.

Then he shook his head. “Still no good. The Blues’ mainframe bunkers are probably guarded more closely than the Crown Jewels, even if I could find them. I don’t have enough pull to get an army together to make the hit.”

And something occurred to him.

“I just had an idea. I’m outta here.”

“What? Tell me what you’re thinking!”

“You must be joking. All the next guy who walks in here has to do is ask you what I’m planning, and I’m done for. No way. All you need to know is, if this goes well, we’ll have some time to breathe.”

“And you’ll just leave me here?” She looked surprised. “You can ask me for anything you want, and you’re just going to leave me? All alone?”

“Of course not. After the stunt you pulled, I’m going to tell Miriam to let every single guy downstairs visit you tonight. My treat.”

He left the room.

Miriam seemed surprised to see him. “Done already? I thought you’d pull an all-nighter.”

“She was tired. You’re working her too hard. Let her rest tonight.”

“No problem. I’ve been paid for the room and the girl. What you do with that is your own business.”

“Thanks.”

He walked into the night, moving quickly. He hailed a motorized rickshaw and told the driver to step on it. As they raced through the flickering neon that illuminated the city, he thought of how he’d pull it off.

* * *

He called in sick and worked for a day and a half without stopping. Upper after upper kept him wired, and when that was close to failure, he let his implants jolt him. A lot of junkies used their bioware just to keep the right nerves stimulated. He knew the dangers of that, but there was little choice now.

The data his implants had picked up from the Blues, as he sat in the bar talking to them, was diffuse… but not useless in the least. All three of them had received communication from their respective mainframes and had sent responses back. As they were obliged to use the cell phone network, everything they sent and received was seriously encrypted. He set one of his machines to work on the encryption. If it was any good, it would take much too long to crack, but he wasn’t trying to crack it—he just wanted to identify it. There were a limited number of decent encryption programs on the market, and he had shortcuts for all of them… if he could tell what it was.

In the meantime, he had another machine working on COO’s mainframes. He knew exactly who was on security duty. He wasn’t thinking of trying a brute-force attack, but one meant to exploit the system’s particular characteristics without leaving any fingerprints. It wouldn’t hurt to have the data in case he couldn’t act against the Blues. If he had to resort to giving up the actual data, his only option would be to run for the airport while the Russians verified the info and decided that it was safe to kill him. Then he could disappear into the Amazon for a few months and emerge as someone else.

While his machines were working on their problems, Brown coded on his own computer, the one he affectionately referred to as his deck. It was a laptop that never went near the net, battered and scratched, and probably the best machine for its size anywhere in Southeast Asia.

The deck was constantly being upgraded and fiddled with, and it was only luck that found it all in one piece and ready to work when he needed it. He drank small vodka shots as he typed.

Brown interspersed the coding with research. He surfed the backnet and sent PMs to a couple of contacts he didn’t trust, but who would jump at the chance to show Brown they knew more than he did. Nothing he asked would arouse suspicion beyond the fact that nothing he needed was usable in any remotely legal way. That was business as usual.

The first thing he learned was that it was no use to try to overpower the Blues’ internal systems. The processors, a mix of bioware and silicon, were pretty much autonomous and smart enough to recognize dumb code. So he needed them to receive the responses they expected, and that meant he had to have some kind of small AI connected to the encryption machine. That wasn’t a problem; he had a pair of near-Turing items in the closet. All he had to do was turn them on and feed them the script. At the end of the day, the Blues were programmed to obey the orders they were sent to the best of their considerable ability

The encryption fell. It had proven easy enough to identify the type, and it was one that could be broken quickly if you had the right tools. Brown did. He quickly wrote an interpreter API for the AI and dropped the encoder into it.

Now. What would be the best way to get these blues off his case permanently?

An idea came to him. Yeah, that would work. The only problem was, if it didn’t, he would die.

Screw it. Everyone’s gotta die sometime.

* * *

If anything, the spokesgoon’s hands were even more blue than before.

He looked around and raised an eyebrow. “I see you like to be close to the stage.”

Today’s show seemed to involve a naked woman with every hair on her body, as well as her skin, dyed Day-Glo green, dancing among a profusion of potted ferns. Like most of Grunt’s shows, it left Brown completely unmoved, but it must work for someone, or he wouldn’t have put it onstage.

“What can I say? I’m a sucker for greenheads. Too bad I can’t say the same thing about blues, or I’d enjoy this conversation a lot more.” He leered at the woman who’d come with them. He probably wouldn’t be into her under any circumstances. Whoever the woman had been before her brain had been transferred had been in the gym a lot… and had probably spent most of that time learning how to mix steroid cocktails.

“Have you got the data?”

“Of course. Right here.” Brown placed a palm-sized black rectangle on the table. It looked just like an external drive… but it wasn’t. There was a transmitter inside powerful enough to override cell coverage on a very, very specific set of frequencies for ten meters around the table, and the connector cable was actually its antenna. The blues, though they didn’t know it, were off the grid.

The one who’d spoken reached out to take it.

“We’ll have to check the data, of course.”

“Of course.”

“If it doesn’t check out, you will be sorry.”

“And if it does?”

No emotions crossed any of the faces. “You’ve been paid. Just forget you ever saw us.”

Brown smiled and asked his implants to turn on the equipment in his backpack. This was the moment of truth. There was nothing he could do now.

The Blue in front of him stood and gave him the grimace-smile again. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” Brown replied. He was starting to get nervous at the lack of any unusual behavior on the part of his guests.

The Blues turned to go, but only managed to turn halfway. Their eyes became unfocused, and Brown could imagine them desperately querying the unusual orders they were receiving.

Finally, the woman grunted and turned back. The one who’d been speaking handed the black rectangle back to him. “Hold this a second. We need to do something. I’ll be back to get it.”

The three filed up the stairs to the stage, and Brown began to breathe again. He knew no one would interfere with them. Blues were always bad news and usually hired killers. So what he’d set in motion was not going to stop.

The striptease they performed was painful to watch, not just because they danced like drunken penguins, but also because the trio hadn’t been particularly good-looking even before they decided to upload their minds and leave the meat behind to run errands, but the audience suddenly went silent and stared.

Dancing done, the main course started. The female Blue got down on all fours, and one of the males positioned himself behind her. The guy’s body blurred and got bluer and bluer as his muscles’ enormous appetite for oxygen overcame his lungs’ ability to gather it.

Finally, dark-faced and open-mouthed, the guy collapsed. He wasn’t breathing anymore.

The second Blue got on his back, and the girl straddled him.

Brown had wanted to give the crowd a bit more artistry in this part of the show, so they started slowly moving together. The thrusting then became urgent, like a couple approaching climax, but then, again, the Blues’ performed as only they could: moving so fast that normal human beings could never approach it.

They died together.

The crowd sat in stunned silence. Everyone knew the owners of the bodies on the stage were safely alive in a computer somewhere, but it was as close as most of them would get to watching the ultimate live snuff performance. The three meatbags, at least, were definitely dead.

He picked up his antenna and retrieved his backpack from under the table. He made his way out through the standing throng.

His trick would probably throw everyone off his scent and buy Akane a few days, if not more. He’d used the Blues’ own addiction to secrecy against them.

Now, though, his major problem was avoiding Grunt. Unlike the Blues, the ex-Marine had no hardware in his head that Brown could exploit, and if it came down to fisticuffs, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Yeah, it would be better to steer clear of Grunt’s bar for a few weeks, at least until the man’s anger cooled. If worse came to worst, he would argue that the bar had had the best show ever, and they had gotten it for free.

Not coming back at all wasn’t an option, of course. Grunt made the best caipiroshkas in town. But it would have to be after the heat died down, and he was going to need a new name.

Brown lost himself in the Bangkok throngs.

* * * * *

Chapter 4

Bangkok, Thailand

Brown dropped the documents into the canal. Passport, driver’s license, gym membership card. In this deserted stretch of canal, they probably wouldn’t be found, and they’d settle in the mud to decompose as much as their plastic content permitted.

If someone found them? That wouldn’t be a problem. The police would dredge the canal, looking for the missing Mr. Brown.

They would find nothing. Or perhaps they’d find many things. But the elusive Brown would not be among those things, and the mystery of his disappearance would deepen until the police finally gave him up for lost and abandoned the search.

Of course, the goons would not give him up so easily, but eventually, given the lack of evidence to the contrary, they’d have to conclude someone had gotten to him and ended Brown’s existence.

Which was exactly what the situation called for.

He pulled out his new phone and dialed a number he hadn’t called in five years.

“Cyrano?”

“Yes,” the intermediary’s voice said. “Who is this, and how the hell did you get my number? You’re not in my database, so you better have a seriously good reason for calling.”

“This is Sked.”

Several heartbeats later, Cyrano spoke again. “Prove it.”

“Libreville. You thought the singer was a woman. I explained the facts of life.”

Cyrano chuckled. “You would remember that one. All right. What do you want?”

“Work.”

“That broke, huh? I knew you’d swallow your pride and come to me sooner or later. As it happens, I have a job that fits perfectly with your particular skillset. Are you still in shape for fieldwork?”

“As long as it gets me out of Southeast Asia.”

Cyrano laughed again.

* * * * *

Chapter 5

Kananga, Congo

“Sounds like a good way to get killed,” Sked said, watching the plaza at three times its natural size thanks to his vision implants. The target looked exactly like hundreds of other Chinese-funded financial centers across the world: a concrete square five hundred meters to a side from which sprang a mall, a couple of skyscrapers, and acres of neon-fronted commercial space.

The Chinese always set them up in countries that would kill for a chance to get foreign investment rolling through. The governments that accepted the help often found themselves selling raw materials to China at very low rates… but since a good chunk of the proceeds went straight into politicians’ pockets, doors were opened gladly.

The only incongruity was the surrounding countryside. The rolling hills and red earth of the Congolese plain was a most unusual backdrop for a financial center, but the copper mines and cobalt deposits were out here, in the boonies.

“Don’t be a wuss, Sked,” Cyrano replied. His voice and image came through the same set of implants that controlled the binocular vision, black-market biological circuitry that should—emphasis on should—be able to fool every civilian security scanner on the planet and most military scanners. But Beijing played hardball. They had some of the best tech in the business. “They’re not looking for you. They couldn’t care less if you’re there. People from all over the globe come to these places.”

“In Congo?”

“Everywhere. That’s why they build them. Your contact with the Rand faction is a woman named Lillian, who is going to be sitting alone, wearing a yellow dress, in a restaurant called the Bangkok Sun.” Cyrano smirked. “Should be easy enough for you to remember. Call me when you can.”

A Thai restaurant. Of course. Cyrano loved to remind him that no matter how well-hidden Sked thought he was, Cyrano’s people would be able to track him. He’d actually flown in from Bangkok two nights before, under a supposedly untraceable fake identity.

Not for the first time, he wondered about Cyrano. The man was a constant source of jobs, usually on the wrong side of international law, and Sked was his first choice of operative. But there was something about the man that gave Sked the willies. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Cyrano was looking at a bigger picture, that the jobs were not selected by chance. Was he working for the CIA? The Euros? Mafia?

The answer: it was none of Sked’s business. Cyrano’s money was good, and the few times things had grown truly sticky, the man had pulled strings and gotten Sked out of the soup. On one memorable occasion, a group of guys in balaclavas had appeared out of nowhere, shot down a couple of guys who didn’t have Sked’s health as their top priority, and then vanished as quickly as they’d arrived.

Cyrano was a cipher, but he had earned Sked’s grudging trust… at least until it became expedient for Sked to fail to survive.

But that would have been the case with any client. And Cyrano’s payment was always prompt, often included a bonus for early completion, and was delivered in whatever the crypto-currency du jour happened to be. The man was always up to date.

He began the hike down to the complex. Dirt roads made up the streets of Kananga, a place that a decade before had been just another African provincial capital, and was now trying to come to terms with its new role as the financial center for the Congo Basin. History showed that it would soon overtake both Kinshasa and Brazzaville as the most important city in the region. The capitals of the two Congos would soon see a migration toward this upstart city, which would end, inevitably, with a fundamental change in the regional power structure. That was what being handpicked by the Chinese could do for a place.

The townspeople watched him pass, their faces the mixture of curiosity and resentment that came whenever a population was dragged into the future without their consent. Sked assumed most of the foreigners avoided walking the streets of the city and limited themselves to the airport and the Plaza.

The financial district was deserted. No one wanted to be out and about on the baking-hot concrete slab. They’d be inside the air-conditioned tunnels that connected everything. As soon as he came in range, his implants began to pick up the visitor Wi-Fi, including the welcome guide. That showed a tunnel entry point just a few yards away, so he ducked inside. There was no chance his arrival would have gone unnoticed—cameras would be ubiquitous—but there was no need to call even more attention to himself.

As soon as he entered the tunnel, he wasn’t in Africa anymore. It could have been Vientiane or Chittagong, or any of the other secondary Asian cities that had been transformed by the installation of a financial center. Each of these places had become much more than the secondary city they’d been when, using whatever algorithm they used to make the choice, a computer in Beijing had selected it as a site. Local customs had gradually been absorbed into the globalized web China was setting up all over the planet, from the oil-rich coast of Venezuela to the crossroads of the Balkans. And all over Asia and Africa, of course.

The crowded, ice-cold passageway held Asians, Caucasians, Africans, and a sprinkling of what appeared to be Arabs and Hispanics. The entire world, in one way or another, was represented, stained by the neon signs of the tiny stores.

Though the place might only be a few years old, it had already acquired a layer of grease—testament to the deep-fried food its denizens preferred—mixed with dirt. Men lounged against walls, watching the passersby. Those would be the guys who’d get you out of debt, who’d hack into a competitor’s website for you, who’d find you a girl, or a boy, or whatever, and who’d carve their initials into your forehead if you couldn’t pay for any of the above.

Sked relaxed. This was the environment he’d grown up in. He could navigate its pitfalls with his eyes closed.

It was still early for lunch. Only a few patrons sat at tables in the Thai place Cyrano had chosen for the rendezvous. He had to look twice before realizing the only woman in a yellow dress was sitting at the back. She had ebony skin and short hair, cut close to the scalp. She smiled when he approached and exposed brilliant white teeth.

“You must be Sked,” she said when he sat in front of her. “I’m Lillian.”

“Yes.” He looked at her suspiciously. “How did you know?”

“Cyrano told me to look out for a mousy white guy who would be dressed all in black. Not too many of those in here.”

Sked gritted his teeth. He hadn’t told Cyrano how he was dressed.

“You’re not what I expected.”

The Rand faction, who controlled Joburg and Pretoria—and had seceded from the Southern African Republic—were not known for their love of native Africans. After expelling everyone with a quarter or more black ancestry from the land they controlled, they’d instated a new, more draconian version of apartheid. Lillian, to put it mildly, would not be their first choice as an agent for a delicate mission.

“I’m not from Rand, if that’s what you mean. But in this case, Rand’s objectives and ours are aligned, so we’re working with them.”

“Who’s we?”

“We is the Southern African Republic.”

“The guys who called for the extermination of all Rand supporters without quarter asked or given?”

She shrugged. “Strange bedfellows. Any problem with that?”

“None. Just want to understand where I’m standing.”

“Fair enough. You’re helping two desperate factions who hate each other and have joined together because this particular Chinese outpost represents a threat to both. Once we deal with it, we’ll go back to killing each other.”

“Sounds like my usual fare.”

“Now that you know, are you still in?”

“Yes.”

As far as he was concerned, nothing had changed. An African faction had hired him to do a job. They were competent, as shown by the fact that they were seated in a restaurant. One of the great selling points of the Chinese-backed financial centers was that they never listened in on any conversation that happened outside of the official areas. There had never been a single recorded violation of that protocol. Even spies and terrorists knew they could speak freely there—unless they were identified and gunned down first, which was also an option. But they would die with their privacy intact.

“We’re looking for an armored division.”

“What?”

“The Chinese have a small army in Congo, and we need to find it.”

“Surely you can rent some satellite viewing time to do that.”

She shook her head grimly. “The last Rand satellite got shot down last year.”

“You?”

“Yes. We didn’t know it would come in handy. And now we’re blind. No one will lend us their eyes in the sky. They say the Rands are racists, and we’re genocidal.”

“Sounds about right. But surely someone… the Israelis? GoogleCore?”

“Not even them.”

Sked whistled. You knew your war was unpopular when even the most cavalier satellite owners on the planet turned their backs.

“All right. Then why not bribe some Congolese official to tell you where they are?”

That’s what he would have done. There wasn’t a single country or corporation whose officials were above a bit of graft, and Congo wasn’t renowned for being among the more honest ones anyhow.

“We did. They have no clue.”

“And you’re afraid the column is headed south…”

“Yes. The Chinese have tried to get into the South Six before.” Those were the six political entities that had been created in the far south of the African continent by the latest South African Civil War. “They’ve failed to get a foothold because of the war going on… we have other things on our minds. But a modern division might be enough to tip the scales on one side or the other, and the Zambians aren’t going to stop them.”

“All right. Do you at least know where the computer I’m going after is located?”

“We think it’s in the tower.”

“Of course it is.” He could have guessed that. The main tower was where all the official Chinese offices would be located; it was the same everywhere. A tactical supercomputer—the kind that could make sense of a chaotic battlefield—would be easy enough to find, and harder to break into.

“All right, then, we’ll go have a look.”

“At the tower?”

“Yes. It won’t be a problem. Just remember, it’s not a public place. They’ll have bugged the hell out of it.”

“What are you planning to do there? I don’t want any cowboy antics. We want to be in and out of here with a location, and without the Chinese knowing we were ever around.”

“That’s what I do.”

“That’s not what the rumors say about you. We checked the darkest corners of the backside of the net. You are supposed to be a total loose cannon.”

“I do what the client asks for.”

“Well, I’m asking for a location and nothing else. I don’t want you trying to divert a nuke and dropping it on the division. I don’t want you to take over their nav systems and drive them into the sea. I just want to know where they are, and you’ll be well paid for the information.”

He held up his hands defensively. “All right, I get it. No flashiness.”

“Glad we understand each other.” She nodded and made to stand.

He stayed where he was. “Not so fast. I haven’t eaten since Macau.”

* * *

The air conditioning was even stronger in the tower lobby. They walked around the elevator banks, a single complete circuit, before walking out again through the same door.

“What was that about?” Lillian asked.

“Just observing the lay of the land.”

That was a lie, of course. He’d dropped a couple of microbots—a crawler and a flyer, each no larger than a mosquito—as they’d walked. They could be controlled through a short-range 1000 kHz transmitter located in his laptop. No one ever paid attention to radio anymore, but bandwidth was limited. To get around that problem, the bugs would only take one reading at a chosen spot before returning.

Lillian didn’t need to know any of that. She just wanted results, and that’s what he would give her.

They took a table at a dark bar as close to the tower as possible. Most of the denizens of financial districts never knew whether it was day or night outside and moved to the rhythms of their own internal clocks. Sked opened his laptop. From the outside, it appeared to be a salesman’s Lenovo. On the inside, it was a completely different animal; every circuit had been built to Sked’s specs by a very secret lab in Hong Kong.

The first thing he did was use a small processor partitioned off from the rest of his machine to look around the bar’s public Wi-Fi system. There were all sorts of nasty things lurking in there, but nothing his own firewalls couldn’t handle. Good.

Then he probed a little deeper. The bar was getting its internet from a local router with poor security, a civilian machine connected to a bunch of mail servers for the local businesses. That would be… useful. He set up a program—something he’d written just for an occasion like this—that would take control of the router and all the connected email clients and send millions of emails to official servers he’d listed. At the same time, the router would send an equally ridiculous number of requests for service to a pair of machines in the tower. Once primed, he left it awaiting his signal.

“Let’s get something to drink,” he told Lillian.

“Aren’t you going to get started?”

“I already have. Now I need to wait, and I think it would be nicer if you tell me about yourself over something with a little kick. What’s the local firewater?”

Lillian shrugged. “How should I know? I drink sake.”

“So, not from around here?”

She refused to answer any more questions and told him to get on with his job.

Sked sipped his vodka—he’d had to order something—and grinned at her, just to make her nervous.

The flyer returned first. That was usually the case, unless security had zapped it. Walkers were just backup systems. It landed, unseen by anyone but Sked, on his laptop, which scanned the data it held before ordering it to return to storage. Numbers came up on Sked’s screen.

“All right. Based on energy usage patterns, both for the overall building and for the air conditioning system, I’d say the tactical server is on the forty-fourth floor, in the office registered to Sinopec Congo.”

Lillian’s eyes widened. “What now?”

“Now, we attack.”

He launched the DoS strike he’d primed earlier. A denial-of-service strike of this sort was a clumsy little thing, nothing that would cause permanent damage, and nothing that would last more than ten seconds once the Chinese decided to shut it down. He could just imagine their cybersecurity guy shaking his head and wishing someone would send a real challenge someday.

And as soon as he saw countermeasures happening, while they were distracted, he launched the real attack, just a small program that hit a communications subsystem that would have much less security in it than the primary system because all it did was route encrypted signals from one place to another. His objective wasn’t to read their communications—that would take a mainframe and weeks—but just to see where they were going.

Now was the risky part. If they caught him inside, they’d come after him and squash him like a bug. Her, too; the Chinese weren’t sexist. They killed people without worrying about that kind of thing.

Ten minutes later, he exhaled. “Found ‘em.”

“What? Just like that? You work half an hour, and they pay you to live like a king for weeks?”

“Sure. But since you insist, I have to make one final check to confirm their position. Come with me.”

“Just tell me where they are.”

“No. We need to confirm this. Make sure I’m earning my keep.”

Using schematics being fed directly to his retinas through the implants, he led her down a series of staircases into a cavernous space.

“What is this place?” Lillian asked.

Sked shrugged. “A parking garage.” While she was looking around, he was busy using his implants to override the security cameras, a tough task when you couldn’t use the local network and had to hijack the Wi-Fi antenna. Luckily, it was all civilian tech.

“That’s stupid.” She looked around. “There aren’t this many working cars in all of Congo.”

“Oh, that will change now that the Chinese are here. Besides, these places are all built to the same set of plans. It’s cheaper to build them with standard components, even if it means there are too many parking spots. There are four more levels just like this one below us, and at the very bottom, under the garage, are the generators and stuff.”

He took her to the bottom level. The garage was deserted, but he still put a finger to his lips before opening the door.

Lillian gasped.

Row upon row of robotic tanks filled the bottom level of the parking garage.

“There’s your armored division,” he said with a grin. They’d walked out of the stairwell and into the garage proper.

“And there are the guys in charge of keeping snoopers out.”

Three men in green uniforms were sprinting toward them from fifty yards away, shouting at them in Chinese.

“Run! This way!”

Sked’s implants showed him another stairwell much nearer than the one they’d descended through, and he led Lillian between two rows of armor.

They stumbled on four guys fiddling with one of the tanks. One look was enough to tell Sked that the men weren’t supposed to be there: the one man with his face uncovered was Caucasian, and the other three were wearing balaclavas.

They didn’t stop to chat, however. With the guards still behind them, Sked wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

A firefight erupted. Even in the echoing halls of the garage, the bark of the Type 95 rifle—that old favorite of the Chinese armed forces—was easy to identify. Whatever the guys in black were using to defend themselves was quieter, but since the shooting continued, it must have been good enough to hold their own.

Just as they were about to enter the stairwell, something clanged into the roof and fell at their feet. Sked picked it up. It was hot, so he pocketed it.

Then they ran up the stairs.

* * *

“Do you think they got a good look at us?” Lillian asked, eyes wide. They were seated in an anonymous bar, drinking sake and vodka again.

“Not necessarily, but they’ll probably check every surveillance camera that looks down on that stairwell until they see us emerge. Then they’ll discreetly come and grab us in the middle of the night.”

“Why are you grinning at me like a lobotomy victim?”

“Because I turned off all the cameras in the vicinity of both stairwells.”

Her fear became suspicion, then anger, easily visible on her face. He grimaced to himself; she might be a great embedded asset, but she hadn’t been trained to hide her emotions too well. “You took me down there just to show off, didn’t you? You could have just told me about the tanks, shown me your data.”

“Maybe.”

“You’re a jerk. Goodbye.”

Sked watched her walk away. He always had trouble making a good first impression.

After she left, he stopped to think of the men in the garage. The Chinese guards were easy enough to explain, and the other men were only to be expected… but Sked didn’t believe in coincidence. That a group of interlopers appeared just as he arrived smelled like anything but coincidence anyway. It smelled like Cyrano, in fact.

While his client was good at getting him out of rough patches, he was just as good at throwing him into the fire in the first place. Missions were often much more than they looked on the surface, but this time, he’d dropped Sked into a difficult spot to get out of. The airport would be watched, and Sked doubted Cyrano would be willing to risk a war with China to airlift him back out, which meant he would be stuck there for some time… just as Cyrano had intended.

He smiled. At least he had some leverage… The metal thing he’d picked up had proven to be a flechette from some kind of silent special-ops weapon. He had pictures of it, which Cyrano would be interested in seeing; they would let him guess who those commandos belonged to.

So that was the score. He was here in the middle of a brewing war with no way to extricate himself—not without blowing his cover sky high—and that was probably what Cyrano had planned all along. Information, the subtle manipulation of events without showing his cards, was what the man did for a living. An asset on the ground was going to be a valuable commodity, soon.

Sked dialed a landline on an open channel, using a one-time encryption key that Cyrano’s system would be able to unlock on the back end. Even encrypted, a regular call would attract very little attention—a lot of commercial firms were paranoid about industrial espionage.

A scratchy noise on the other end told him the man was listening. “This is going to cost you,” Sked said.

Cyrano laughed. “You figured that out quickly. I’m glad I chose you for this one.”

“Good for you, but I’m not entirely sure I’m happy about it.”

“Check your account.”

Sked did, toggling the information on the implant. He whistled. “That’s quite a little sum.”

“Yes, but I should be able to get it back and make a bundle on top of it. No one else spotted this one heating up in time to get assets on the ground.”

“No good to me if I get my asset shot off in a three-way war.”

“Yeah, so feed me the data I need, and I’ll keep you safe. I take it you found the tanks.”

“Yeah, I’ll send that over a safer channel when I can.”

“I take it they’re nearby.”

“You could definitely say that.”

Sked could have sworn he heard the man nodding at the other end of the line. Cyrano had known but needed confirmation. He also needed an excuse to put Sked in harm’s way.

“What about Lillian?” Sked said.

“She no longer represents our primary client group.”

“Can I still talk to her?”

“Of course. She’s still paying us… it’s just that there are people paying much more.”

Sked sighed. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Just keep me informed of what’s happening on the ground.”

“That’s it? There doesn’t seem to be much to tell.”

“Oh, there will be,” Cyrano said.

As if on cue, the communication suddenly cut off, as did the Wi-Fi, and every alarm in the financial center began to blare. Instructions in Chinese told everyone to remain where they were, and that the blast doors would be lowered for their own protection.

Sked tried to get out of the tunnels but had only made it as far as one of the residential modules when a solid door cut him off from advancing forward.

He sat on the concrete floor and glared at it.

“Well, isn’t this nice,” he said.

But experience had taught him that the door would open—either because it was ordered to, or because it was blown apart, or because Sked himself overrode the security—and he would be tossed into a maelstrom of desperate people in the midst of a conflict that most of them didn’t understand.

And then, he would earn every cent of the fee Cyrano had already paid him. The fee that had made Sked an obscenely wealthy man.

* * * * *

Chapter 6

Kananga, Congo

Sked cursed at the steel door. It cut the corridor off from the rest of the finance center. Just around the bend, the big door on the other side would be just as tightly sealed. Any smaller maintenance passages would be dead, too.

Lockdown.

Finding Lillian again was going to be a bitch. He blinked a couple of times to get his retinal implants to respond. Schematics and a map. Wi-Fi wasn’t running, and the center was shielded against transmissions from outside, so there was no chance to contact her.

He’d have to do this the hard way… on foot.

First things first. Being locked in a corridor full of food sellers wasn’t going to help him, but brute forcing a blast door wasn’t the way to go about it. Good way to get noticed.

Pausing only to buy a VatVeg burrito he was pretty sure he was going to regret later, he made his way toward the corridor marked on his map. A hooker and her client were just emerging—a good sign; the girls always knew the spots no one was likely to wander into.

The door at the end of the tunnel was steel, too. If they ever had a fire in one of these places during a lockdown, they’d be able to sell barbecued business people at wholesale prices.

Easy does it. The trick was to get the door open without tripping every alarm in the complex.

One thing worked in his favor—no one was looking for him. Lockdown was meant to stop armed groups from moving around, not individuals with… certain skills.

He pulled out his laptop, jacked a cable into the electronic lock, and then put the laptop back in the pack. If anyone stumbled over him, it would look like he was just resting… unless someone spotted the wire. Then he was screwed.

The lockpicking program ran from his implants, and when the assessment came up, Sked laughed out loud. Was it really that basic? He double checked for traps, Trojan horses, and hidden surveillance, but no. Then he checked the position of security cameras. Nothing trained on that door. This wasn’t a sensitive part of the installation.

“Open Sesame.”

He popped through, and then strolled in the correct direction, trying to look like he belonged, and like he was as confused as everyone else by the fact that he couldn’t get through the doors. His implants warned him when he came into a camera field so he could look away just as the camera saw him. An unfortunate coincidence for whoever was watching.

Two more doors presented little difficulty, and he was standing in the lobby of one of the residential zones.

“Nice,” he said to himself. “Lillian appears to doing well for herself.”

Eschewing the lift, he hiked to her door, and was about to lean into it when he remembered his manners. They didn’t get much use in his line of work but, once upon a time, he’d been at school in Singapore, where manners were drummed into youngsters at a tender age. Doorbell, then.

“Hello.”

“Go away.”

She slammed the door. He rang again.

“What?”

“We need to talk.”

“Are you trying to blow my cover?”

“I don’t think anyone within a thousand miles cares about your cover. Not anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s started.”

“What… Oh, for fuck’s sake, get in here.” She grabbed an arm and dragged him inside. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Lockdown.”

Her ebony skin paled to gray.

“Because of us?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Sked shrugged. “The grid’s down. I suppose you don’t have a window.”

Buildings in finance centers tended to be warrens where only one apartment in twenty had a view. Those were usually occupied by Chinese nationals.

“Actually, I do.”

He rushed into the bedroom. She was telling the truth; one entire wall was glass.

“Man, someone screwed up.”

He placed his phone next to the window. Like the laptop, it was much more than it seemed; buried inside were a very powerful transmitter and a satellite receiver. The problem was the antenna. He couldn’t place it beside a window; it had to be outside… and the windows in these things didn’t open.

“You might not want to watch this part.”

The drill was hidden inside a pen, and it spun furiously. The battery pack didn’t last very long, but it was more than enough to create a hole a couple of millimeters wide in the glass. He threaded the wire through and waited for it to pick something up. It was just a matter of time; Cyrano’s people had bandwidth on every bird in the sky.

He sent a single message up, one word: Lockdown. Then he downloaded the package he’d known would be waiting. The antenna came back in, and he put the phone away.

“OK,” he told Lillian after a quick scan of the data. “Now we know what caused the lockdown. Belgians, of all things. That flechette we picked up along the way… turns out it’s used by Belgian commandoes who do a lot of EU dirty work.”

“So the Euros are in play?”

“I don’t know. These guys do a lot of contract work, too. They certainly aren’t exclusive. Besides, this doesn’t feel like something Brussels would authorize. They shit their pants if China even looks at them funny.”

“I still don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”

“If that’s true, you’re the worst spy ever.”

“Well, it’s true, and I don’t care what you say. Get out.”

“No way. I’m not letting you out of my sight. We’re going to go have a look at these Belgians.”

“Like hell. I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m just going to sit this one out.”

“You’re lying.”

“You’re fishing.”

“No I’m not. The hole I just drilled in your window isn’t the only one. There’s another right beside your bedside table… a convenient place for you to put your phone at night without anyone asking any questions, don’t you think?”

Busted. Lillian sighed. “And how do you plan to find these guys? Every asset the Chinese have is being thrown into the search, and they still haven’t found them. What makes you think you can do better?”

“I have something they don’t.”

“What?”

He was about to say Brains but decided not to let her in on all his secrets at once. Instead, he replied, “A package from a friend.”

* * *

“Bingo,” Sked said and played a drumbeat on the table. “That’s one of them.”

“You sure? Hard to tell from that shot.”

“Hell, no, I’m not sure, but the software is, so what I think doesn’t matter.”

“You sure do depend on that quite a bit, don’t you?”

“Of course. Humans are fallible. This baby isn’t.”

Hacking into the finance center’s security camera system without tripping alarms had proven impossible, so he’d changed tacks. He hacked into a private security company. Every shopkeeper in the center had their own system, and most of them were third-partied out to an outfit called Clynocop. Like most so-called “security” companies, their own frame was lousy with backdoors and exploits.

Disgusting.

But useful as hell. Since the network was down, they’d had to sit beside the company’s storefront and enter their Wi-Fi system, which, of course, no one had remembered to shut down. The firewall was a joke, so he’d uploaded the images of the known mercenaries Cyrano had beamed over, and run his custom ID-ware, using the firm’s criminally understressed processing power to match the faces to images stored in the huge memory banks that held the security imagery. He’d gotten a hit within minutes, from a camera they could reach using only a single maintenance door.

“He went into that building over there,” she said, pointing to the screen.

“Yeah. I wonder if we can access anything inside.” He hit a couple of keys. “Damn. Nope. That place isn’t one of Clyno’s clients.” A yellow indicator lit up on his screen; someone had noticed he was in there. “Time to go.” He slammed the laptop lid, which served to shut down the antenna and open the circuit that ran it; the company’s geek squad wouldn’t be reactivating it against his will. “We’ll need to eyeball this one.”

They moved. “For a supposed computer expert, you seem to enjoy getting your hands dirty with real-world stuff,” she groused.

She was fishing. He smiled. “If you want, you can stay behind. This is the part where I get some answers… so if you don’t want to share, I understand completely.”

Lillian grunted. Yeah, she wasn’t bugging out at this stage. She hadn’t wanted to be there, had wanted to run her own op, but now she would see it through.

“This is our stop.” They reached the door into the sealed-off sector that held the Belgians. The fact that everything was still locked down convinced him that the Chinese had no clue to where the commandos might be found.

“Give me a second,” he said once the door was open.

It took more than a second—but less than five minutes—to hardwire a little black box that would allow him into the finance center’s local grid from his implants, via his laptop, as long as he didn’t go too far away. He still had plenty of juice, but he’d likely need to recharge every battery he owned once they were done. He hid the box in some wiring, hoping it was too small to draw attention.

“What’s that, a bomb?”

“I’m not a barbarian. It’s just a little bit of insurance.”

“Will we need it?”

“I hope not, but the guys we’re going to visit aren’t exactly here to organize a church luncheon.”

The opaque glass door was unlocked. When a fully integrated facility like this one went into lockdown, the only locked doors in the place were the doors the Chinese wanted locked.

He led them inside, hardly knowing what to expect.

What they found was a building lobby like any other around the world, polished black stone, chrome-and-leather seating, and a bunch of bored-looking guys in suits lounging around, waiting for the doors to open and the Wi-Fi to start running again. Old hands knew lockdowns happened. Despotic and arbitrary—albeit temporary—cessations of individual freedoms were the price one paid for access to international markets and glorious profit.

The Belgians were easy to spot. Though dressed exactly like everyone else, down to the charcoal- gray suits, they stood out like a collection of sore thumbs. The rest of the businessmen were potbellied and slouching in their seats… these guys were all tall, trim, and straight.

“Okay. Just realized we don’t want to mess with those dudes.”

“Just now?”

“Yeah. I’m slow that way. But I’d love to see what’s in that case.”

The case in question was a black box thirty centimeters long, ten wide, and ten tall, on a small chrome and glass table. Of the eight men around the table, fully half were staring at it intently.

The other four were scanning the room, expressions of intense menace fixed on their features. Despite the crowd, there were several empty seats adjacent to their table.

“Maybe we should sit here,” Sked suggested. He selected a spot about ten meters from the Belgians. Close enough to study them for a while before deciding on a course of action, far enough to run for the door if it hit the fan.

A sudden hush—one of those things that happen in crowded spaces every once in a while—fell over the crowd, and a couple of French phrases floated across the room. Sked caught two words he recognized; “femme” and “garage.”

Some of these men must have been the ones they’d run into just before the lockdown. They were running from Chinese security at the time, and the Belgians had been attempting to steal a robotic tank in a parking garage full of them—or at least that was what it had looked like—and then engaged in a prolonged firefight with the finance center security team. Their paths had crossed for the fleetingest of moments.

And yet one of them had had the presence of mind to be able to recognize Lillian again.

“Trouble.”

They were cool. Unspoken words passed, and a couple of the men absently stood and pretended to stretch.

Sked hit a command and launched a wide-open communication into every node connected to the center’s security cameras, including a couple of things that would override the images coming from entire sectors.

That should get their attention.

And if it didn’t, the message—“The men you are looking for are here”—and map overlay certainly would.

“They’re coming,” Lillian said.

“Just sit still. They don’t know who’s side we’re on, so they won’t shoot us.”

“You sure?”

“No. But if we run, they’ll shoot us on general principle.”

The Belgians had abandoned subtlety. They approached from opposite sides, striding confidently. Yeah, they would be able to reach their weapons before Sked or Lillian could do anything about it.

“Bonjour,” the nearest one said when he arrived.

“Hello,” Sked responded sourly.

“We seem to run into each other often, no?”

“Looks that way. How’s the auto theft business?”

“Was going well until you soured it. We barely made it out, and we had to kill a couple of guards. Regrettable.”

“Yes.”

“And this lockdown… we blame you for it.”

“Too bad. We were just looking for some privacy. Weren’t expecting to find an armored division down there.”

“Who are you working for?”

The gun had appeared out of nowhere, but it meant business. A thick, gleaming barrel designed to fire non-standard ordnance… quietly… anything from solid flechettes to explosive rounds meant to blow things up.

“Not the Chinese.”

“Ah. But that still doesn’t tell me what I need to know. I’m going to shoot you in the leg. If you scream, I’ll kill the girl.”

And that was when all hell broke loose.

The Chinese didn’t come through the windows. That was smart, since the glass, though opaque from the outside, allowed a perfect view of the corridor around the building. They broke through the roof and landed on the Belgians with a crash of breaking glass and polyglot screaming.

The commandos were good. The two around the table who didn’t get clobbered by falling building materials and security personnel reacted immediately. They even managed to cut down a few of their assailants before fire from above took care of them.

The two men flanking their table evaporated. Sked thought he saw one leaving through the nearest door, using the multitude for cover. He assumed the other must have taken off before anyone else even had a chance to react.

Sked was expecting the assault, but the violence and direction caught him off guard. Pretending to panic wasn’t hard. He grabbed Lillian’s hand, screamed, “Ohmygod, ohmygod,” and let the stampeding crowd buffet him in the direction of the hole in the roof, dragging his companion behind him. He tripped over the remains of the little table the Belgians had been sitting around and sat there with a befuddled look on his face until one of the Chinese soldiers told them, in no uncertain terms, to get the hell out.

He let Lillian drag him away.

* * *

In a deserted maintenance corridor, safely on the other side of a locked door, she actually laughed at him. “And you call yourself an operator? You went to pieces in there.”

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Sked replied. “It’s a good thing I happened to land on this; if not, it would have been embarrassing.” He pulled the box the Belgians had been guarding out of his backpack.

Her eyes widened. “You…”

“Yep.”

She laughed. “Point to you. Now can we please open it? I’m dying to see what’s inside.”

“Maybe I won’t show you.”

“Maybe I’ll turn you in.”

“They’ll take you, too.”

“Might be worth it.”

He sighed. “All right. Digital lock, should be child’s play.”

He put a couple of magnetic sensors on the side of the lock and just gatecrashed it with his machine. It was nice to be able to blow something away for a change. The lid popped open.

“Oh, crap. This isn’t going to help us.”

Lillian said nothing. He thought she couldn’t have spoken even if she’d wanted to. Her eyes nearly bulged out of her head.

The box was full of diamonds, of small but uniform size, glittering in the fluorescent light.

“We intercepted their payment.”

“Can we keep it?”

“If we’re suicidal. The survivors, certainly the two at our table, will be after this. You can live forever off of what’s in this box. Comfortably.”

“You’re going to throw them out?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I get half.”

“We live through this, we can talk about it.”

“I get half.”

He wasn’t going to argue. It just wasn’t the time. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Progress was considerably easier now. The lockdown ended just as quickly as it had started, and Wi-Fi was coming back online.

After a few minutes, Lillian spoke again. “That was a good question.”

“What was?”

“Just whose side are we on?”

“I assume you still work for the South African Republic. Me? How the hell should I know? No one ever tells me anything. I only know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“We just landed on someone’s shit list. Someone with access to one hell of a lot of diamonds.”

They kept walking in silence. Diamonds, especially in this quantity, narrowed the field a bit, but none of the options were people Sked wanted on the opposing team.

It was shaping up to be a long day.

* * * * *

Chapter 7

Kananga, Congo

Glass shattered.

Sked looked up. A pane of glass from the dome above had shattered, the pieces falling five meters away. “What the hell?”

“Drone.” Lillian pointed to an eight-rotor surveillance platform weaving drunkenly through the air above them. “Hacked hard. I thought you’d done it.”

“No. I’m a little busy trying to figure out what’s going on. Who’s fighting who?”

“How should I know? Right now, it’s just someone hacking a toy helicopter.”

A crash signaled the end of the drone as it slammed into the ground.

“Let’s find somewhere out of the way. Things are happening, but I have no clue what.” He closed the laptop and got up.

“Can’t your precious machine tell you?”

“Not unless we want to alert every security goon in the complex. Right now, whatever’s happening has nothing to do with us, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

“Nothing to do with us? Pretty big coincidence, then.”

They’d been infiltrated into the Chinese finance center in Congo by factions who wanted to stop a couple of Beijing’s operations… “You’re right. It has to do with us, but not specifically. If we want to do our job, we need to find out what’s going on, and to do that, we’ll need to hunker down. I have a feeling it’s about to hit the fan.”

It was much more than a feeling. He’d installed a couple of boxes near comm nodes—nothing likely to be noticed, just passive detectors to see when signal traffic spiked—and they’d lit up like a neon Christmas tree ten minutes earlier.

“Let’s get out of the general area,” he said. “I suspect we’ll be in lockdown again in no time.”

But when they reached the door to one of the maintenance corridors, it opened without complaint. Very suspicious.

“I think we should take the main service spine.”

“What for?” Lillian ran behind him, having little trouble keeping up. He suspected, if things really went to hell, she was perfectly capable of leaving him far behind.

“Who’s moving there, and what they’re doing, will tell us a lot about what’s going on. Next corner.”

They emerged at a run. The spine was bright with stark white light. Floors and walls were white, and the corridor was about ten meters wide and equally tall—anything the Chinese needed to move could move through there.

Including a robotic tank blazoned with the red and yellow star of the People’s Liberation Army, which flew past, leaving gouged tread marks on the pristine white PlastFloor, and thudded off the walls hard enough to shake the entire complex.

People in blue uniforms, the ubiquitous service staff, dove out of the way or ran before it. At least two were hit by the uncontrolled mass. The cacophony of screams and engine rumbles was deafening.

“Trouble!”

“You think?” Lillian retorted.

“Yeah, I do, and I’m not referring to that tank. Look over there.”

Troops in camouflage fatigues had flooded into the end of the corridor from whence the tank had come. The piercing shriek of a hypermissile drowned out the rest of the noise, and the tank exploded, throwing everyone nearby to the ground. Most of them didn’t move afterward.

“Who are those guys?” Lillian screamed.

“Who cares?”

He pulled her through a series of turns, always selecting the smallest hall available on the assumption that anyone attacking this complex would do so with a metric crapton of manpower and wouldn’t piddle about in the little corridors.

A niche—a parking space for robotic cleaning machines—stood open and empty, so he ducked inside and pulled out the laptop. His implants were very nice, but now wasn’t the time for finesse. This computer could brute-force anything.

“Okay. No more mister nice guy,” he said as he typed furiously. He threw everything in the computer’s arsenal at the firewalls and security systems. No one would send troops after a hacker when they had tanks fighting guys with missile launchers in the halls.

“Holy crap.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this place is taking the biggest cyber-slapdown I’ve seen this side of Thailand. We’ve got all sorts of crap trying to either force the gates, or simply distract the keepers long enough to slip something through.”

“So, can you get any information?”

“Of course, but it’s a bit disappointing. I was looking forward to blowing away the defenses… but now, all I got to do is harvest a nut that’s already cracked.” The screen showed a map of the finance center, pulled directly from a Chinese tactical computer. Several areas were lit up in red and blue dots. “Combat zones,” Sked said, pointing them out. “Red is obviously the Chinese. Blue is whoever is trying to get in. There are some white dots in there, too—I think they represent people the Chinese aren’t sure about. Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“We just showed up in white.”

“What?”

“Look. This is us, the corridor, the nook. Someone is still on the ball, cyber-security wise.”

“Yeah,” an unexpected voice said, causing them to turn suddenly. “You should probably run. And leave that laptop behind. The drones they’ll send won’t be confused like the last one.” A young-looking Japanese man stood in the doorway. Tall and thin, his eyes bulged out from sunken cheeks that glowed with embedded circuitry. His pupils snapped open and shut like a camera lens, too quickly to be sure it had happened, leaving you with just the impression.

“And who are you?”

“I’m running. This place will be destroyed in thirty seconds. You can come if you like. Leave that brick.” He sprinted across the corridor.

Lillian followed him.

“Damn,” Sked said. The laptop had cost a fortune, but the guy was right. Equipment could be replaced. He set it to upload its data to his cloud backups, and to burn itself down when finished. Even if the drones didn’t get it, there would be nothing of value, nothing that could be traced back to him left. Then he ran.

A hundred twists and turns later, they stopped. Lillian and their nameless benefactor stood by in amused silence while he wheezed, trying to get air into his lungs.

“You can keep the diamonds, Sked,” the man said. “I don’t think the Belgians are going to survive the battle that’s coming… and no one else knows you have them. You’re clean.”

“You know I have them, and I’d like to know how.”

“I have my ways.”

The phrase, the inflection… he suddenly knew who he was talking to. “Cyrano.”

The Japanese man smiled. “Ah, so you figured it out.”

“You don’t look like a Cyrano.”

“No one looks like a Sked.”

“Fair enough. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been here all along. I like to be near the action… although, granted, I wasn’t expecting quite this much action.”

“If you were here, why even bring us into this?” Lillian asked. She didn’t look happy.

“I wasn’t the one who brought you into this. You were already here. As for Sked, his approach is more direct than mine. I thought he might find things I’d miss. Like the Belgian mercenaries. They were right under my nose… and I had no clue until you stumbled over them. Hell, I think all of this—” he waved his arms around to indicate the finance center being blasted to pieces around them “—is probably your doing.”

“You can explain later. I hear people coming,” Sked said. “In here.”

This time they dove into what appeared to be a small interview room of some sort. The door was a normal model that swung shut. Cyrano looked at it critically. “I don’t think that’s gonna stop a hypermissile,” he said.

“If they’re coming for us, the thickness of the door won’t make a ton of difference,” Sked replied.

But the boots thundered past.

“There must have been a hundred of them.” Lillian looked more scared than he’d seen her so far. Whatever game she was playing, someone must not have been following the script.

“Well, they seem to be gone now. Let’s roll,” Cyrano said.

“Let’s roll?” Sked asked, one eyebrow raised. Then he tried the door. “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“Door’s locked.”

“Can’t be. Let me see.” Cyrano pulled on the handle, straining to budge the door. “Come on, help me. Put your shoulders into it.”

It only took a few minutes for them to realize the thin veneer on the door was adhered to some kind of light metal they couldn’t dent. “We’re not getting out that way,” Lillian said.

“Unlock it,” Cyrano ordered.

“No way. I left the laptop back there, remember?”

“Use the implants.”

“You’re nuts. I use the implants, they’ll send every virus they have at me over the link. You ever see a brain fry, Cyrano?”

“More than once. Didn’t look too bad. Smells like bacon.”

“Well, I’m not doing it. What’s that?”

A buzzing noise filled the small room. The bare space held only a chair and a couple of tables, no electronics that could be making the noise.

“Just cleaner bots. Look.”

Lillian pointed to a corner of the roof. An access tube had opened to disgorge the ubiquitous cockroach-like nanorobots whose job it was to dissolve accumulated grease, crumbs, and other organic detritus.

“That many cleaner bots?”

The wall was a moving black carpet, and more and more were still coming from the vent. They watched, mesmerized, as the flow of robots reached the floor.

It came straight towards them. “What do we do?” Cyrano asked.

“Hell if I know. They aren’t dangerous, anyway.”

“Unless we drown in them.”

The cleaners were swarming around their ankles and beginning to climb up their pants. Lillian giggled.

Then she yelled. “Ouch. Crap, one of them bit me!”

“Impossible. They don’t have mouths,” Sked replied. “Ow, fuck, ow.”

“Told you.”

“They’re using their cleaning burners. They’re going to digest us one crumb at a time. Ouch.”

“Step on them,” Cyrano said, crunching a few underfoot.

“No good, there’s too many.”

“Then get this lock open.”

He was right. The robots were ankle high, so they tried to kick them off as they clambered onto the table, each suffering painful burns as they did. Sked whirled through menus and found the door. Then he hit it with a routine that, he hoped, would go unnoticed as it opened the lock.

“Cyrano, try the door.”

His client jumped across, gave the handle an exploratory tug, and climbed back onto the table. “Still locked.”

“Dammit.”

Sked had no choice, so he threw the kitchen sink at the lock protocols through his implants. Even as the door popped open under the sheer weight of the cleaner bots, he could feel a huge counterattack pressing against his security. He turned everything off and hoped no one would guess the combination that allowed the Wi-Fi to be turned back on. He wouldn’t survive the kind of attack the Chinese military could send his way—implants, once discovered, could be deadly to the user.

They ran through the hallways again. Another doorway put them back in the public areas of the complex, in a food market the fighting had already left behind. A vendor’s cart still burned, its yellow light illuminating the bodies of those who’d erroneously believed a shooting war didn’t apply to them. “I think we should probably get back outside. No one is going to be attacking the local villagers,” Lillian said.

“Lead the way,” Sked replied, trying not to think of how easily the battalion of tanks in the subterranean garage could be turned against anyone, including the neutrals who just happened to be the center’s neighbors.

A stairway led to the external plaza, and into a world where there was no war, and the African sun shone brightly onto an unusually placed office complex. Only smoke rising from shattered windows gave any indication as to what was going on inside.

Sked turned to Cyrano. “All right, time for some answers.”

Cyrano stepped away and cocked his head. “How much are you paying?”

Sked studied his client and took a deep breath. In his line of business, you almost never got to confront your client face-to-face. Cyrano looked completely out of place in the strong sunlight. Sked knew his own skin was pale, but the client took the look to an entirely new level, and his skin showed a series of fine lines, a cue that Cyrano was probably much older than he looked.

It was what showed under the skin that drew the attention, though. The glow of red and green light seemed to be even stronger in the bright glare and resembled fanciful schematics of power grids brought to life.

Sked stood down. Whatever extreme body mods were under there, he didn’t want to set his client off… especially not now that he was completely helpless. He held up his hands. “I just meant, I think it’s only fair that you tell me who we’re working for. With all these factions, I think I’ll need to know. There’s gonna be fallout from this, and not knowing that will severely limit my options.”

Cyrano laughed, and his head glowed. “Don’t let the window dressing fool you. There were only ever two factions in this dirty little war. The Chinese, with their finance center and robotic tanks, and the faction represented by the young woman—” he nodded toward Lillian “—the unholy alliance of the African National Congress and the new Apartheid movement in Pretoria. The Belgians were working for them, and the stones are the giveaway. Who but Pretoria would pay in diamonds?”

“So which side are we on?”

“You know that already. We were hired by the South Africans. You were paid, and I got you out alive. I believe that leaves us on our usual terms.”

He held out a hand.

“Yeah, I guess.” Sked took it.

“And I’m sorry about the fighting. That wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Yeah. I figured that. Thanks for pulling my chestnuts out of the fire. Again.”

Cyrano shook Lillian’s hand and walked back into the finance center through the same staircase they’d climbed earlier. Smoke wafted out as the door opened and dissipated in the afternoon light.

Lillian gave him a look. “You gave up pretty easily.”

“That’s because Cyrano is working for the Chinese.”

That earned him a knowing half-smile. “What makes you say that?”

“There was no reason for the South Africans to hire him. All my presence inside could possibly do was set things in motion before they were ready to act. By putting me on the trail of the tanks, he assumed I would run into them sooner or later, although he probably didn’t think it would turn out to be a physical confrontation. Beijing thought the attack would come through the network… the mercenaries were an unexpected touch.”

“And that convinced you he’s on the Chinese payroll? Why not the Euros? Or the Americans?”

“He was the only one who didn’t get bitten by the cleaner bots.”

Her face clouded over. “Yeah. I should have seen that.”

Sked held out his hand. “Well, I guess this is it.”

“Just one second. You’ve already been paid for this; now it’s my turn.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The diamonds. I get half.”

“A quarter.”

A small projectile gun, loaded with a single flechette, appeared in her grip. “Maybe I’ll take them all from your corpse.”

“All right. Half. Here you go.” He rummaged in his pack and threw over a package.

Lillian peered inside and hefted it. “You had this prepared. It was always your intention to give it to me.”

“I just wanted to run a little test.”

“Did I pass?”

“It wasn’t that kind of test. Let’s just say, I know a little more about you now.”

“I’m not sure that makes me happy.”

“Into each life, some rain must fall,” he replied.

He waited tensely for the three or four seconds it took her to decide what to do. He was nearly certain she wouldn’t shoot him… but staking his life on “nearly” was a good way to get killed.

An eternity later, she turned wordlessly around and headed back inside.

He walked down the stairs that led away from the complex. Some people in office attire were milling about at the bottom.

“What’s happening in there?” one asked.

“War.”

“Is it safe to go back inside?”

“Only if you’re good at fighting wars,” Sked replied.

“But it’s getting late. It’s going to be night soon.”

“Good.”

He brushed past the final few guys blocking his path and toward the nearest dirt road out of town, eschewing the Chinese-built highway that linked Kananga to Kinshasa. That road was going to be tank central. Better to try to make his way east to Mbuji-Mayi and get home from there.

It was going to be a long, dusty walk, and Congo was still a tough country.

But that was fine with him. It was probably a good idea to get off the grid for a while. His implants could be activated by remote and used to fry his head. He needed to get the antenna removed as soon as possible. When the actual shooting war stopped, the survivors would be looking to trim the loose ends… and Sked was a loose end.

A few weeks in Africa began to seem like a good idea.

After that, he could sell the knowledge he’d gained here. There was a lot of information about Chinese security protocols locked in the memory banks of his implants, plus whatever the laptop had managed to upload before it fried itself, or the drones slagged it. He’d need to review everything carefully, but there should be some valuable nuggets in there.

Then there was the information about Cyrano. The way he looked was pretty interesting. His methods. His relationship with the Chinese.

And Lillian. She was a Chinese double agent too, of course. The gun was a dead giveaway… only someone on the payroll, someone expected to have to deal with outside security threats to her person, would have had one. She’d nearly made it without giving herself away. He wouldn’t have suspected if she hadn’t gone all moody when she realized Cyrano hadn’t been bitten by the cleaners. That showed her who was higher up in the hierarchy, and she didn’t like it.

Most of all, he had to get off the grid to think. No matter what Cyrano said, Sked was sure there was a third player. A nice walk in the wilderness would be just the thing to think about who it was.

He could easily avoid the two players he already knew about, but having an unknown player on his tail, someone who’d stayed in the shadows while everything went off the rails… that could be deadly.

Sked walked, and night fell.

* * * * *

Chapter 8

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Six Months Later

The cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against the back of his head.

“You’re a moron, Sked,” the owner’s voice whispered in his ear. A woman. “Half of Belgium wants to kill you, and you fly through Amsterdam? What are we? A hundred kilometers from Brussels?”

“What do you want?” he asked. Sked glanced around for help, but no help was forthcoming. It was three in the morning, and he’d chosen that particular corner of the airport precisely because it was deserted. The only good sign was that she was talking. Had they wanted him dead… he’d be dead.

“I have a proposition. Job offer.”

“What kind of job?”

“One that will keep you alive long enough to complain about the pay scale.”

“You’ll shoot me if I refuse?”

“No. I’ll just leave you here. How long do you think it will take the Belgians to find you?”

“They can’t have followed me here.”

“No, but they might have followed me. I broke a lot of firewalls tracking you down. A couple of your fake ID suppliers might not want to work with you anymore.”

“Great. That should help. Again, what kind of job?”

“One of your kind. Just a hacker job. Should be child’s play.”

“If it’s so easy, why don’t you get someone else?” he asked.

“Because I told them you were the one guy who could do this. That was the only way to save you.” The gun moved away from his head.

Sked turned around. Black leather pants, dark hair cropped shorter than his own. Pale skin. Big bags under sleepless eyes. “Akane? How did you get out of Bangkok? I know you had a couple of months as a working girl left. I thought your enemies would have gotten to you after that.”

“Yeah. Good to see you, too. Now get moving. I wasn’t kidding about the Belgians, and the Chinese will probably be right behind them. If you survive to see dawn, I’ll consider us even.”

“I’m more worried about Cyrano. He knows exactly what I saw.”

She gave him a curious glance but left it there. Professional courtesy wasn’t one of Akane’s strong points, so he made a mental note to keep a sharp eye on her. Some secrets were deadly, even if the person supposed to be keeping them owed you her life.

“Just shut up and move.”

A panel behind them swung open to reveal the entrance to a white-walled conference room. From there, she inserted a card—connected by two thin wires to the base of her neck—into a security door. Moments later, they emerged into a maintenance tunnel. An elevator took them down a level.

A glass door opened onto the tarmac beneath the nose of a plane. Cubana de Aviación.

“You’re taking me to Cuba?”

“Shut up and climb into the luggage cart.”

The cart was a roofed box on wheels that had just disgorged its contents into the Airbus above. Clearly robotic, it sprang into motion as soon as they were seated and drove out along a perimeter road beside the outer fence. Sked was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be there and was glad they weren’t visible inside the vehicle.

The box stopped, and Akane sprang out. He followed, expecting a fence.

Ten meters of the airport’s perimeter was simply missing, and they walked right through. He didn’t ask about camera coverage. Akane was a pro; no one would be watching this.

A car stopped on the road beside the fence. They got in and drove for five minutes, then boarded a small river boat, which puttered for another twenty. Finally, they transferred to a slightly bigger boat with a silent crew that motioned them into a hold that smelled of fish.

How long they took to reach their final destination after that, he didn’t know. He’d been awake for three straight days and, secure in the knowledge that Akane wouldn’t let anyone murder him without putting up a loud fight, Sked fell asleep.

* * *

A stiletto boot to the side woke him. Akane might not let anyone kill him, but she had no issue with damaging him herself. The boat was swaying in a way that told Sked he needed to get off before he lost his meager dinner from the night before.

It was too dark to see much, but they were obviously not on a river. Swells rocked the boat, pitching it every which way.

“Up,” Akane said.

Rungs drilled into a worn concrete pillar represented the only way to ascend. Spray soaked them both, and the boat’s movement made grabbing the rusty metal an iffy proposition.

“After you,” Sked replied.

“And let you watch my ass when I climb? Keep dreaming. Up.”

He reached out, half-expecting to miss the rungs entirely and drown in the dark water. To his surprise, he managed to grab hold of the ladder on the first attempt.

It was a long way up, and his sodden clothes weighed a ton, but he couldn’t complain unless Akane did, and she was stoically coming up after him. Then he noticed that her leather gleamed too much in the arc lights… since he’d seen her last, back in Thailand, she’d swapped it out for some kind of shiny plastic, doubtless waterproof. No wonder she wasn’t complaining.

The climb ended at a sheer ledge, and he looked around to see where they’d landed. His heart sank. This wasn’t dry land. An oil platform?

It certainly didn’t feel like an oil platform. The lights showed a few windswept Quonset huts on a large concrete square, but nothing even remotely resembling the industrial intricacy of an offshore drilling rig. Unless he was mistaken, the platform was also slightly tilted to one side.

He didn’t ask. They’d tell him if they felt like it.

The nearest door was brighter than the night, but only just. Akane disappeared inside.

“Ah. Sked,” a deep voice said. “Your reputation precedes you. Should we re-encrypt all our data, or is it already too late? Is it true that your brain can erase hard drives?”

Sked turned in the direction of the words and waited for his eyes to adjust. Tiny red lights illuminated the room… barely. They emerged from a rack of mainframes and laptop workstations manned by a motley collection of pimply boys and girls who couldn’t have been much more than twenty. The screens Sked could see showed green letters over black backgrounds… a theatrical statement of old-schoolness.

Finally, seated on a raised pedestal in the darkest corner of the room, a man’s form came into view. A bloated, nearly circular torso topped by a pale bald head, veins throbbing all over it, had apparently been plugged into the computers with several thin, dark cables.

“Spyder,” Sked said, nodding. “I never thought I’d meet you in the flesh. Hell, I didn’t think you actually existed in the flesh.”

“And yet, you know who I am.”

“Everyone knows who you are.”

The bloated head nodded. “I suppose. Do you know why you’re here?”

“Akane mentioned a job.”

“Yes. She was most insistent that you were the only one who could do it. I personally think she just wants you around… but since you were nearby and—how to put this delicately?—available, I authorized the extraction. The Chinese nearly had you, you know.”

“And what’s to stop them from grabbing me here?”

“There’s no digital trail between the airport and this place. From the moment you stepped through the fence, none of the vehicles were online. And we scanned you when you came in. No implants, so they can’t have tracked you.”

That last part… wasn’t exactly true, but Sked wasn’t going to contradict his host. It wouldn’t have been polite. Also, even bioware implants were potentially dangerous to his health if anyone realized he was equipped with them.

“Where are we?”

“In the sea.”

So they weren’t going to tell him. He shrugged. He’d find out sooner or later. Or he wouldn’t.

“Fair enough. What’s the job?”

“I need a number. A bank account number.”

“I didn’t think you were in it for the money.”

A ham-like hand waved its dismissal in the darkness. “Perish the thought. The account I want is the one Levant Revolution uses to receive their monthly payoff from the Israelis.”

“You want me to hack into the Mossad’s backend?”

“Or the terrorists… you choose. All I want is the number. I already know it’s a UBS account.”

“And what then?”

“Then you forget you ever did the work, and we all go on with our lives.”

Sked held his gaze. “What’s to stop you from tossing me overboard once I’m done?”

Spyder shrugged. “What’s to stop me from tossing you overboard now? I’m pretty sure Akane can do the work if we reduce the number of distractions.”

The man was right. Hell, even one of the underage techs could probably make a decent attempt at such a simple job… although not as invisibly as a specialist would.

“Have you got a decent connection and a powerful laptop?”

“Of course. In fact, we chose this location because it allowed us to tap right into the fiber optic trunk line between Europe and the US… we don’t even need VPN, because no one knows we’re here.”

“Impossible. You can’t splice into an undersea optic line.”

A grotesque parody of a smile flashed in the dark. “Why don’t you let me worry about that? I’ve got one of the bedrooms set up for your use.”

* * *

The machine they lent him was decent but couldn’t hold a candle to the one he’d had to destroy in Congo. Still, it would do for the job they wanted. Escaping this platform was another matter; the connections he needed were in his head… literally.

Sked’s bioware was designed to be completely invisible to everything but very specialized scanners. His implants weren’t quite as powerful as the usual silicon-based items, but they were more than good enough for augmented memory, database functions, and surfing the web.

He couldn’t connect his implants to the local network—that would be a dead giveaway—but at least he could recover some of his cached passwords and links to uploaded attack programs, which he could then use to do the job he’d been hired to do via the laptop. He hated to give Spyder access to his tools, but there really was no other choice.

After painstakingly entering a number of web addresses by hand, Sked got to work.

* * *

Akane still had pillow marks on her face when she opened the flimsy wooden door to his room.

“I thought you’d be up,” she said with a wan smile. For a second, a single second, the Akane he’d first met flashed to the surface, but then the shutters came down again.

“Yeah, I’ll have this in a couple of hours. I hope your boss is right about no one being able to find us… because if not, we’re gonna go right to the top of the places-to-bomb list. The Lebanese won’t be happy.”

“You went after the Arab side of the equation?”

“Yeah. I don’t mess with the Israelis.”

“Still, you probably could have gotten it out quicker.”

Sked shrugged. “I’ve got time, and Levant Revolution isn’t exactly good at covering their financial tracks. That’s the way these groups always get caught, isn’t it?” He pushed the laptop away. “So how’d you get involved with the Spyderman?”

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Just like you.”

“You were safe. I left you safe.”

Akane shrugged. “Yeah, you saved my ass big time, but eventually, the bioware dissolved, and I walked out of the brothel, a free girl.”

“And the Russians?”

“Still after me.” She leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. “I never got to thank you for saving my life.”

“I think we can call it even now.”

“No, I’m not sure we can. If the Russians had gotten me then, they would have made it long… and they would have made it hurt.”

“Yeah.” He looked at her uncomfortably, remembering other nights, nights that could have led somewhere, had she wished it. He let the silence stretch until it was painful. “So why are you here?”

She looked uncomfortable; it was clear she knew exactly why he was asking. But Akane never looked uncomfortable for long. “I just came to see if you had a plan for getting yourself out of here.”

“He’s going to kill me?”

“You think he’d tell me if he was?”

“Fair point.”

“So? I didn’t rescue you just so you could become fish food.”

“Yeah, I’ve got an idea.”

“You gonna share it with me?”

“No, but if you want to come, let me know,” Sked replied, delighting in the anger beginning to simmer in the dark eyes. “But I guess you won’t. I’m a hunted man, after all, and you’ve got a good thing here.”

“Of course I want to come.”

He shook his head. “Your self-destructive tendencies are going to get you in trouble one of these days.”

“Hell, when you run, he’ll think I sprang you. I’m in trouble either way.”

“All right. Get out of here. When the time comes, you need to get into this room straight away.”

“And how will I know?”

“Trust me, you’ll know.”

* * *

Sked chuckled at her discomfiture; Akane would be seething in her cabin, jumping at every noise and shadow, afraid to miss the sign.

She wouldn’t miss the sign.

But in the meantime, he turned back to the computer. He’d fibbed to Akane a little bit. He didn’t need two more hours… the Lebanese group’s computer security had been laughable—sufficient, perhaps, to hold off a casual attack from a pimply kid like the ones Spyder employed, but laughable all the same. And he didn’t even want to talk about their operational security issues. Most of the machines he’d gotten information from belonged to people who really shouldn’t have been in the loop.

So now, he just needed to set the pieces in place to get out of there.

He felt a bit sorry for Spyder, but if the man wanted to play with the big boys… he’d need to upgrade his toys. Too late now.

An invisible monofilament wire that had been threaded into Sked’s clothes now snaked its way from a subcutaneous port in his neck to an antenna mounted just a few feet away from the hut they’d given him. It was a radio mast, old and rusted, but still functional enough for his purposes.

He smirked. They might not have told him where he was… but Sked knew enough about military history to hazard a guess. Knock John Fort, one of the Maunsell Naval Forts from the Second World War, abandoned decades earlier.

He subvocalized, and the words appeared on his implants, which were connected to the radio antenna and transmitting to a receiver that converted radio to IP, which, along with some coded instructions, allowed him to communicate with the people he wanted.

I agree to payment terms. I’ll send you the coordinates as soon as I get Tanson’s word that the room I’m in will be spared.

You have it, came the reply in jade green text.

Tanson never broke his word. Sked sent the coordinates and wondered which of the factions that wanted Spyder’s hide Tanson’s group would sell the information to. He was curious, but Sked knew how things worked. His job was to stay in the hut with the windows closed. If he did that, he would live through whatever came next, even if the Chinese were the ones on the other end of the strike team. No matter who you were, you didn’t double-cross Tanson.

What’s the ETA? he asked.

Stay inside, was the response.

Could they really already be in the air? He quickly emailed the account number to Spyder—if the other man ever recovered from whatever was coming his way, Sked didn’t want him to think he’d been involved in any kind of double-cross. As far as Spyder would know, Sked had been hired to do a job and had delivered. The rest was conjecture.

Minutes later, even before Spyder could send his goons to deal with Sked, who was now an unnecessary luxury, a high-pitched whine announced a hyperneedle strike. Sked dropped to the ground, but—as promised—the hut remained untouched. A scream sounded outside… a short one.

He resisted the urge to look out the window and barely looked up when Akane crashed through the door and dropped beside him.

“You should have told me. Hyperneedles? I’m lucky to be alive.”

“I didn’t know, and I’m glad you’re OK. How’s the rest of the base?”

“Ever seen a block of Swiss cheese? This is the only hut that didn’t get drilled. I was in bed, and a couple of those things flew right over me. If I’d been standing…”

“Ugh. Well, I hope they don’t make any mistakes about the immunity.”

“Yeah. Especially any intentional mistakes. If anyone got wind that you’re here, they’ll come after you, too.”

“Not this time.”

He felt her shrug beside him as if to say that it was his ass if he was wrong.

Choppers sounded in the distance, then got closer. Shouts. Gunfire. A stray bullet flew through the window and sprayed glass all over them. They stayed down.

The commotion ended as abruptly as it had begun. The choppers took off in a roar of rotors and jet engines, and every sound died away, except the howling of the wind through the shattered window.

They got up carefully, brushing the glass off.

“You’re cut,” he said.

Akane looked at the gash on her arm. “It’s nothing. We’re fine.”

The door was intact, and when they opened it, they found the lights on, much brighter than they’d been when Sked arrived. A light rain fell.

They walked around the concrete platform. Every hut except two had been torn to pieces. One was the hut that held Sked’s room—and even it had been hit by hyperneedles… everywhere except in the area that contained his room.

“Someone was really unhappy with the old arachnid,” Sked observed.

“Yeah, but they were good at not hitting you. Who’d you sell him out to?”

He ignored the question. “Let’s go see the Spyder’s lair.”

The largest of the huts remained untouched. Whoever had done this obviously wanted the man alive. He didn’t know whether they’d succeeded. There was blood on the floor near Spyder’s dais. His cables had been yanked out, and the tips were covered in gore. There was no sign of a body.

In fact, there was no sign of any bodies. But for the fresh blood, the expended casings, and a couple of fires smoldering and popping to themselves in the spitting rain, there was no evidence that the fight was recent.

“They probably tossed the dead meat over the side and took what they wanted,” Akane said, studying a laptop with a bullet hole through the screen.

“They left a lot of stuff, though.”

That was true. Some of the mainframes appeared undamaged. Ditto some laptops. There was enough equipment here to keep a couple of hackers in business for a long time.

“Yeah, every single byte infected by the Spyder’s security protocols,” Akane replied.

“So what? We can wipe it all and see where we stand, or we can use half the machines to hack the other half. There should be some valuable stuff in there. It might take us a few weeks, but really, where else can we go? Plus, the internet access is incredible.” He paused. “Well, unless the Spyder lied to me.”

“You think we should stay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “No one will ever think of looking for us here again. Not after what happened to Spyder. You don’t go back to the scene of a massacre. You hide and hope no one notices.”

Akane looked around. “Where are we, anyway?”

“England.” He was surprised she didn’t know that but supposed the Spyder had kept her as much in the dark as he’d wanted to keep him… and she didn’t have an unmonitored internet connection.

“It doesn’t look like England. It looks like a piece of concrete someone forgot out in the middle of the sea.” She scowled. “And how the hell did you manage to call for help? Spyder had every one of his geeks watching what you did on that machine of yours, and we know you don’t have implants. We scanned you six ways from Sunday.”

Sked smiled and ignored her questions. “So, do we stay here?”

She shrugged.

Clearly, they were going to have to work on their communication skills. But it was good to be alive, and to be completely off everyone’s grid.

He could get used to this.

* * * * *

Chapter 9

Somewhere in the North Sea off the Coast of England

Rain fell diagonally across the concrete expanse, as it had for the past week, thundering against the steel roof.

Sked looked out the window, growled, and turned back to his welding.

“There. Done.”

Akane’s head poked out from under a pile of cables and connectors. “If you’re actually finished, you have all the bandwidth you could possibly want,” she said.

“Let’s see if this thing works. What should we call it, Frankenputer?”

“Nah, that’s been done. CrashXPress.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Akane replied with a note of finality.

Sked sighed. His sense that the name was complete crap was superseded only by his knowledge of how useless it was to argue with her. “There. I’m online.”

“Any customers yet?”

He blew a raspberry and sat down to check the new system’s capabilities. He chose a small bread factory in Toulouse as the first victim. They had a website with a GooglePress backend, decent stuff for civilian use, well encrypted and secure on any number of levels. There was a pretty basic way to brute force one of these… inelegant, but perfect for testing his new system’s capabilities.

“Start the counter on my mark,” he said. “Three, two, one… mark!”

He watched the bars on his monitor turn from red, to yellow, to green. “Mark!”

“Are you kidding?” Akane said.

“No. We’re in. That was the complete cycle. How long was it?”

“Four-point-three seconds.”

The words hung in the air for a few moments. Neither of them wanted to break the spell. Those numbers could make them a fortune in days.

Finally, Sked whistled. “No wonder the Spyder was so rich. What the hell is in those boxes, anyway?”

“Optics and quantum switches?” Akane said.

“You’re guessing. You don’t have a clue, either.”

“Of course not. I thought they were just regular processors until you pointed out the weirdness.”

“Well, I’m going to see what a couple of well-placed messages can scare up. Hit reset on the countdown, because people are going to start looking for us as soon as word gets out about the new brute-force player.”

“They can’t find us here.”

“That’s what Spyder probably said, and now he’s having his fingernails pulled out one by someone in a dungeon somewhere. We might have a few weeks, if we’re lucky.”

“Whatever. I’m going to take a shower.”

Fortunately, the attack that had devastated Spyder’s hidden base, an abandoned WWII era fort platform in the sea off the coast of England, had left enough parts lying around to repair the water pump and the heater elements. They even had heat and electricity. It wasn’t exactly a luxurious setup, but it would do.

He concentrated on getting their message out there, putting it, and a few codewords, in chatrooms where it was sure to get noticed, and setting up safe comms protocols for customers. The prices he set were high, but he still had four inquiries waiting by the time he finished his prep work.

Sked scanned the messages. Three were too hardcore for his sensibilities—all were requests that they hack into the Tokyo Subway and smash trains together as a protest against the new implant tax. Apparently, that was the next big thing. Sked shuddered. Someone was going to take the money and run with it, even if he wouldn’t.

He deleted those.

The fourth was more interesting. It offered a cool five million, guaranteed on both ends by a broker Sked had worked with before, for cracking into a lab in Yekaterinburg and publishing their files on the net. It looked like the lab was run by a bunch of scumbags who had a thing for weaponized Anthrax, so they probably deserved what they were about to get. Sked flagged it as a maybe and decided to wait another hour to see what else filtered in.

“Trouble,” Akane’s voice behind him said.

“Always. What now?” He turned to look at his former lover and current partner in crime.

Akane wasn’t alone. She had a woman—little more than a girl, really—by the arm. The second woman’s eyes looked like optical discs, wide and round, and shiny with rain and tears. A welt on her cheek was turning into a bruise. Akane hadn’t been gentle with her.

Sked stepped toward them, hands held up to show he meant no harm, and immediately regretted it. The girl smelled like a rat’s nest; urine and food, and dirty, dirty human body mingled to create an unforgettable bouquet. He stepped back.

“Did she stow away in the hold of a fishing boat?”

“I have no clue. I caught her stealing food.” Akane held up a carton of protein bars.

“Let her have them. She looks half-starved.”

The girl snatched the proffered box with a feral snarl. Sked took another step forward, breathing through his mouth. “What’s your name?” he said in his most soothing voice.

“No need to tell you,” the girl replied in German-accented English. “You’ll be dead soon. We all will.”

“No one’s going to find us for a few days,” Sked replied.

“No need. You don’t know the security override. Spider’s gonna kill ya.”

“Spyder?” Sked said. “I don’t think so. He was snatched, and he’s probably in a cell somewhere, being tortured. He’s got bigger problems than us.”

“I mean it. We need to get the hell out of here.”

“No boats. The raiders sank the ones we had.”

“Then call for help. We need to leave.” All traces of the feral thing from whatever sewage pipe she’d crawled out of was gone. The look the girl gave them as she gnawed on the cereal bar was intense. “In an hour, maybe less.”

“That’s crazy. Why?”

“Everyone knows about the spider.”

“What spider?”

That seemed to catch her off guard. “Spyder’s pet. It will mess you up. I haven’t seen it, but we all knew. Bitch-lady here, she knows.”

That was a mistake. Akane hit her in the gut, a short but powerful blow that doubled the unknown woman over. It was the kind of casual violence he’d seen from her all too often when she began to run with the criminal gangs in Hong Kong.

Akane turned to him. “There were rumors of some kind of deadly security system that would tear everyone to pieces if Spyder didn’t enter a security code within a specified time frame. I think it was a week. Everyone believed it, but it just sounds like standard psy-ops crowd control to me.”

“It’s real, bitch,” the new girl said between retches.

Sked sighed. “Look, I’ve been over everything that survived the attack with a fine-toothed comb. There’s nothing in any of the computers that could hide a nasty. Just relax, and we’ll talk in a bit. Can you get her cleaned up?”

“No time,” the girl said. She struggled in Akane’s iron grasp.

“Do you want me to hit you again?” Akane said as she dragged the girl in the direction of the complex’s single working shower.

* * *

Ten minutes later, they had a job. Sked was sufficiently rattled by the girl’s sudden appearance that he accepted the offer to hit the Russian lab without taking the time to really mull it over. He was engrossed in getting the automated sequences right and setting up the transfer nodes to make backtracking impossible when Akane returned.

“We’re screwed,” she said.

“Again?”

“Really this time.”

“Why, what’s up?” Something in her voice told him it wasn’t just Akane’s constant griping.

“The girl. She’s implanted six ways from Sunday.”

“Really? That sucks.”

“You said it.”

“Why would Spyder let her hang with his crew?” Only a real noob would get detectable implants. They were convenient for civilians, he guessed, but they were way too easy to hack. Anyone in the business knew enough to avoid them like the plague… too many people had died of fried brain when someone who meant them no good had overheated a hacked ‘plant.

“He had interdiction for the people with implants, running over the wi-fi system. No one was getting any information out of them and, if someone fried your brain, that was your problem.”

“But it is our problem.”

“Yeah,” Akane agreed. “The interdiction field went down with all the other security stuff you disabled, and we’ve been here nearly a week, which means anyone doing security sweeps will have spotted her. Hell, she’s so pathetically shielded, they can probably detect her implants from orbit.”

“Damn. Where is she now?”

Akane shrugged. “I left her in the shower, but who knows. She could be anywhere… but it doesn’t really matter. The only connection to the net is through the tube you’re guarding, and unless she can swim a few dozen miles, she’s not really a flight risk, is she? In fact, it would solve a bunch of problems for us if she decided to make a run for it and drowned herself.”

“Come off it. She’s just a kid.”

“Old enough to get involved with Spyder.”

“Still.”

“So how are you thinking of evacing that computer?”

“I’m not. I’ll take a couple of the components for study, and to see how Spyder managed to get so much processing power into those units, but I’m not lugging the whole rig around. You can keep it.”

“So we’re just going to abandon it here and not make any money out of it?”

Sked grinned. “Who said anything about not making money? I’m setting up a job… we should still have a little time, and this will only take a couple of hours.”

“What’s the payout?”

“Five million.”

She whistled. “That’s a good hourly rate. Who’s going to hate us afterward?”

“The SVR, probably.”

“Ah. Nice. Well, you don’t get nothing for nothing. With any luck, they’ll think the Spyder did it. How long before we can get the hell out of here?”

“I’ve negotiated a boat out in four hours. We’ll have plenty of time to pack.”

They shared a chuckle. Both of them had arrived on the run, snatched to the relative, albeit indentured, safety of the platform in mid-transit. It wasn’t the kind of setup that included luggage.

“We’ll be all—”

He never finished the phrase. The platform shook. Hard.

They were both slammed to the ground.

Akane appeared to be shouting a question, but Sked couldn’t hear her. His world was overrun by a metallic screeching of colossal proportions. He covered his ears and waited for the noise to stop.

When it did, Sked staggered to his feet. He checked his program. Still running… those little modules weren’t just extremely fast; they were also robust. More than ever, he wanted to know what made them tick.

Only then did he remember that there was something very wrong somewhere, and he should probably go see what it was.

He emerged from the single large hut on the platform and immediately wished he hadn’t.

A nightmare looked down on him through the rain. Some sort of biomechanical construct with too many legs, painted black, and sparking like a fire at a power plant. It was three stories tall.

“Shit,” he said and dove to one side just as a whip-like extension buried itself into the concrete where he’d been standing. Splintered rock whizzed past, and one piece tore a gash in his cheek. He ran for the living quarters, zigging and zagging under debris to try to keep out of sight.

Akane was there before him. She pulled the girl out of the shower, naked and struggling, tossed a threadbare blanket over her, and headed out again. Sked paused only to pick up the laptop he’d been issued when he arrived.

“Where are we going?” he shouted.

She just turned back and put a finger to her lips.

Wherever they were going, he would find out quickly enough. It wasn’t that big a platform. The monstrosity behind them, in the meantime, had apparently lost interest.

They stopped at a concrete structure off to one side. It was a cannon emplacement with a steel door that looked like it had rusted shut months after the fall of the Third Reich. “That won’t open,” Sked said.

“Yes, it will. Help me.” They pulled and, sure enough, it screeched open wide enough for them to squeeze through and pull it shut behind them. Sked just hoped they would be able to open it back up after whatever happened. Being torn to pieces by a giant spider-thing wouldn’t be fun, and starvation even less so.

Darkness enveloped them, and Sked felt the walls closing in. The cylinder couldn’t have been much more than three meters in diameter… and not quite tall enough for him to stand up. He instinctively felt for a corner, a futile endeavor in a round room.

Failing that, he went for his next mainstay: his implants. He knew what he had to do, of course. It was simply a question of connecting his bioware—undetectable implants, the kind used by people who both knew what they were doing and valued their lives—to the platform’s network and, through them, controlling the computer they’d hacked together from parts. That would be powerful enough to hack into the spider and turn it off or, better still, to drop it over the side.

But his implants were designed for stealth, not power. They couldn’t transmit through the concrete and steel of the bunker, and the Wi-Fi signal wasn’t getting in, either. He opened the laptop he’d taken. It was something he did by instinct, and even though this one wasn’t his beloved supercomputer, he couldn’t bear to leave it behind to be crushed to silicon and plastic dust by the thing coming after them.

“Whatcha doing?” Akane asked, a ghost in the soft light from the monitor.

“I’m going to connect with CrashXPress and try to hack into that thing’s motor systems.”

A huge impact sounded above them, and dust and chunks of concrete fell from the roof. Akane smiled a thin smile. “Then I suggest you get cracking.”

But again, the Wi-Fi confounded him. “Crap. I can’t punch through.”

Their tiny world shook again. How the walls held, he had no clue.

“Too bad old Spyder’s security system doesn’t appear to have that same limitation. Still think it’s a psy-ops thing?”

“Not helping…” he said, desperately trying to find a network, any network he could get into. Once outside, the thing would probably be child’s play to take down. Big robots like that one had a lot of unshielded control systems—their advantage was purely one of surprise and brute force. You were usually dead before you knew what had hit you. If you could regroup and think, they were quite harmless.

Which was all very nice… in theory.

In practice, apparently, the constant terror and vibration made acting against them a tricky proposition.

Maybe if they threw the girl out, it would be distracted for…

That was it!

“You, naked chick in the blanket. What’s your name?” he asked, typing furiously.

“Why…”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve hacked into your implants. No. Don’t fight me. There. I’m going to use those little foghorns of yours to transmit. It’s going to feel funny, having me there in your head, but these units are way overpowered, and for once we’re going to use it in your favor, OK?”

He looked up at Akane as he typed. Her too-cool-to-care-that-I’m-about-to-die-horribly look was, for a fleeting instant, replaced by something that looked, in the darkness, like hope. Even—could he dare imagine it?—admiration.

There. He was in.

Thump!

A fist-sized chunk of concrete landed on his keyboard. He brushed it aside impatiently and kept typing.

Crunch.

The roof folded in on itself. The thing outside wasn’t messing around. One more hit like that, and they’d be purée.

“Hurry,” Akane said.

“I’m hurrying.”

“It’s just that—”

A huge crashing noise filled their ears, followed by another, and another. Dust flew up from everything.

But the roof, miraculously, held.

“What happened?”

“I turned it off, and it fell over.”

“Really? That’s it?”

“You should know better than to ask.” He shut the laptop with a deft motion and walked to the door in a crouch. “It’s perfectly safe to go outside.”

The others helped him push the door open, and they stepped into the rain.

“That is one ugly spider,” Akane remarked.

Sked noticed that the girl beside them was shivering under her blanket. “Come on, let’s get you some clothes,” he said.

“Uh-oh,” she replied.

“What?”

She pointed to her head. “Signals.”

“Oh, damn. Akane!” Sked started to look for cover again, but it was already too late. A floodlight—the silent-rotor helicopter was obvious now—pinned them in place.

“Put down… is that a laptop? Put down the laptop now.” The loudspeaker, impersonal in almost American English, cut through the rain and wind. “Now.”

Sked complied.

The chopper landed in an open space to their right, a door gunner keeping everyone honest as it did so. Guys in black balaclavas stepped onto the slick concrete, assault rifles at the ready.

“Man, are we glad to see you,” Sked said. “We’ve been stuck here for a week!”

The closest of the commandos faced him; he could almost feel himself being scanned by the guy’s helmet cam.

“Ah. Sked. Do you know the reward for you is currently sitting at more millions than you can shake a stick at? We’ll auction you off to the highest bidder.” The guy turned to Akane and did a comic double take. “And you… hell, you make his reward seem like peanuts. Unfortunately, no one wants you alive, so…”

He raised his gun.

“Any last words?”

A tentacle, the nearest one from the mechanical spider, impaled the soldier. Another dropped the second man. Then the spider itself tore the helicopter to shreds before pushing the whole bloody mess—chopper, soldiers, and the biomechanical monster itself—over the edge.

Akane gave him a suspicious look. “I thought you said it was dead.”

“I thought it was, anyway.”

“Bullshit. I’ll find out how you did that.”

“Whatever you say, dear.” There was no way he was going to tell Akane, of all people, that he had bleeding-edge wetware implants that were more than capable of running a robot by remote control. She would sell that information to the first bidder, not even bothering to wait for the highest.

“So what now?” Akane asked.

“Well, I’d like to get paid for my time, so I need to see if we’ve knocked over a lab in Russia. After that, I want the boat to hurry so those guys’ friends can’t catch us here.”

“And me?”

“Get our portable radio antenna some clothes before she dies of exposure, will you?”

Akane growled and stormed away, dragging their unfortunate stowaway in her wake.

Sked chuckled and walked off to check his progress.

* * * * *

Chapter 10

Cooke City Montana, USA – Ten Days Later

“This is more like it,” Akane said.

Sked hadn’t been to the US in ages, and they’d had to come into the country the long way around, through Canada, after dropping their mystery implanted girl off in Toronto, with a good chunk of crypto to keep herself alive, and threats of dire retribution if she failed to keep her mouth shut.

It was fair to say that the man who returned to his home country was a very different man than the one who’d left years before. The memories were still present, but the operating system accessing them was utterly changed. So his thoughts about the countryside might be skewed.

Either way, Akane was right. Cooke City looked the way Montana should: single-story buildings huddled around a couple of gas stations on a worn and potholed road, a tableau framed by low hills and scrawny pines.

By contrast, Livingstone—where they’d gotten off the Greyhound bus that brought them across the country—had resembled a midwestern suburb.

“It’s not exactly Shanghai, is it?”

That snapped her back. “You’d better be right about this guy,” Akane said. “We’ve been out of the game here in the west a long time.”

“Relax. You’ve got more money than you can ever spend. Why the grief?”

She looked uncomfortable, and Sked smirked. Akane wasn’t in it for the money. There had been times, if she’d cashed her crypto, that she could have bought an island in the Caribbean. Other days, she’d been in debt to the point where, if her creditors had gotten their hands on her, they would have sold her organs for spare parts. And that wasn’t counting her days as an indentured slave. It was all the same to her. Money was just an indicator of the state of play.

Akane was in it for the excitement of the game.

And that was why the deeper mysteries had always remained just beyond her reach. No one liked loose cannons, and Akane was the loosest Sked had ever met.

Unfortunately for him, he found her fascinating.

“Getting back into things in Asia will be a real mess if you’re wrong. That’s all I’m saying.”

“You try to get back in now, all you’ll get for your trouble is a bullet to the back of the head. The people you’ve pissed off are long past the point where they’d torture you for your crimes. They will just kill you and post the pics in case anyone else is getting frisky. You sure you wouldn’t prefer to retire?”

She set her mouth. “Take me to this Nirvana guy.”

“We can’t go yet. We need to wait until morning. There’s a long hike up a mountain before we can get near the place.”

She looked around. “You’re saying there’s a guy who can clean up our tracks and give us new identities around here? Work the Yakuza and the Russians won’t be able to penetrate? That’s some pretty heavy stuff.”

“He’s the best.”

“Then why is he out in Boonieville, Montana?”

“For the same reason Spyder was in an abandoned naval fort in the middle of the North Sea. He doesn’t want an audience.”

“And how come I’ve never heard of him?”

“Because I’m in much deeper than you will ever be.”

She sneered him off, but Sked saw the look that admitted, despite the heavy-hitters she regularly hung out with, he might actually be right.

He was. In the world of hacking, a girl like Akane had her uses. She was the blunt instrument, the Light Brigade, charging forward in full view, drawing fire from all sides.

You didn’t tell blunt instruments where the decoder rings were stored. You kept them in the dark about the gray areas.

Akane, he saw, was beginning to suspect the harsh truth.

“Is there a hotel in this place?”

“A motel. We can get a room there.”

“Two rooms.”

“One room. I want you where I can see you.”

“Well, if you try anything, I’ll kick you in the nuts.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

* * *

The following morning dawned bright and clear, a perfect fall day. They were out of the hotel by 6:00 am.

“So, where to?”

“Mystic Mountain,” Sked replied.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“We’re going to find this Buddha character at some place called Mystic Mountain?”

“His name isn’t Buddha.”

“I don’t care. Since you won’t tell me what to call him, and he’ll give us Nirvana, I’m calling him Buddha.”

A theological discussion wasn’t in his plans. “We have to hike ten miles to get there, so we’ll probably need some water, and maybe some energy bars.” The gas station provided both, and some jerky, too, which Akane insisted on purchasing over his protests.

“So what do we do? Climb this Mystic Mountain and call for him on a secret astral frequency?”

“No. We go to 45° North, 109° West and look around. We’ll find what we need.”

“That’s a huge area. I assume you have exact coordinates.”

Sked smiled. “Of course I do, but I’m not giving them to you just yet. If our host allows it, you can have them.”

“I’ll just locate it with my phone.” They’d bought chips and cheap phones back in New York after crossing overland from Toronto.

“I took the liberty of removing the battery while you slept. I’ll give it back to you later.”

Anger flashed across her features, but she said nothing. The skin on Sked’s neck crawled. He knew Akane would never give anything up without a fight. It was one of her guiding principles. She might defer action for a few minutes, but not give up.

The hike was anything but a walk in the park. The blogs he’d read had made it seem like an easy trail led from Cooke City to the upper slopes of the mountain. He made a mental note not to trust blogs by people whose profile pics showed them hanging from ropes above dizzying heights. Those people were sadists.

At noon, they finally arrived at their destination. The GPS coordinates, according to his phone, told him they should be within ten yards of their target.

“So, what am I looking for?” Akane said.

“Anything that looks out of place.”

“We look out of place here. You look like a vampire someone pulled out of his sarcophagus. I’m going to laugh at your sunburn tomorrow. And remind me never to hike wearing black clothes again. I’m just glad I ditched the plastic pants.”

She was right. The patch of ground they’d reached after their tortured hike through rugged terrain and over ice-cold streams was just gray rock, at a slight angle, hidden behind an outcrop halfway up a hill about three hundred yards from the base of the mountain itself. The only salient feature was a long furrow in the rock, nearly straight and deep enough to put his hand in. So he ran his fingers the length of the depression.

He’d hoped to trip a hidden catch or something, but nothing happened.

As he turned away in disgust, he heard a scratching sound. Sked looked at Akane, but she was also listening, trying to find the source of the noise.

A ghostly voice spoke to them, almost too soft to hear.

“Who was the third doctor?” it said.

Sked knew the answer. He hated any and all things related to that particular TV show, but if you hung around the places on the net he did, you eventually became intimate with the trivia. Still, it was better to double-check. He toggled his implants.

“No cheating,” the voice said. This was followed by a ghostly chuckle. “Besides, you haven’t got the juice to overcome my interdiction.”

Sked ignored Akane’s look. She was the last person on the planet he wanted to know that he was wired for net access with nearly undetectable bioware. That kind of thing was a huge asset as long as no one knew it was there… but it could be exploited in painful—sometimes fatal—ways by those who did.

“Jon Pertwee,” Sked said.

“Close your eyes.”

Sked did, but Akane must have been cheating, because when a sudden blinding flash shone redly thorough his tightly shut eyelids, she cursed in pain. Again the chuckle, but this time, it sounded right beside them.

The light lasted for about a minute.

“You can open your eyes now.”

The world had gone dark. The noonday sun on a cloudless, glorious afternoon had given way to inky black.

“Do you see anything?” he asked.

“I can’t even open my eyes. Dammit, that hurt like hell.”

“Whatever.” Sked slowly realized it wasn’t completely dark, and he wasn’t blind. A reddish glow surrounded them. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, the empty darkness resolved into a long tunnel. How the hell they’d been transported there was anyone’s guess; his own theory was that the rock they were standing on had been a moving platform.

It made no difference. They were in; that was what mattered.

He took Akane by the hand and led her down the corridor to a slightly less darkened room.

“Hey, I can see again. It hurts, though.”

The room had two doors and a huge scoreboard clock on the wall, one of the ones with big red numbers made of individual bulbs, and that had been the light that guided Sked through the tunnel.

It was sitting at thirty minutes and began counting down as soon as they stepped into the room.

A single desk with a computer on it sat between the doors. It had a Post-it note stuck on the monitor. The equipment looked fifteen years old.

Sked read the note.

Break into hyposecure.com.

He handed it to Akane.

“He wants us to hack a site with that piece of junk?” Akane said.

Sked shrugged and bent over the desk. He had a browser and some tools. Nothing compared to what he could get at home, but that was what the browser was for. He wouldn’t have to run anything off this device.

So he studied the security around the site. Not too impressive, firewall from about three years ago, and hosting that wasn’t set up to handle too much traffic. Sked calmly connected to a couple of remote tools he’d set up for precisely this kind of situation and launched a pair of mid-level attacks. Nothing too fancy, because he was certain his usage was being monitored, but just enough brute force to run a diversionary DoS strike, and to get through the defenses while the admin was distracted. Then he sat back to wait and watch status bars and progress reports.

When everything went green, the clock still showed nineteen minutes, and the door to his left popped open.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Akane said.

The room they entered was exactly the same as the one they’d left, except the scoreboard clock was counting down from twenty minutes instead of thirty.

Sked pulled the Post-it off the monitor.

Her turn. Crackbot.com.

“All yours,” he said, showing her the note and gesturing to the keyboard.

“Wait, what? What do they expect me to do with this old piece of garbage?”

“Break into that company’s backend, maybe write something obscene on their homepage.”

“With this?” But she was already typing.

Sked paced around the room. The speed with which Akane’s fingers moved across the keys made him suspect that she was writing code as she went. Did a hacker as well-known as her actually not have any backed-up routines ready to use? It was ridiculous.

He sweated. His own access to the Promised Land—which was how the community referred to the near-legendary place they were about to enter—depended on the ultimate irresponsible player.

But leaning over her shoulder wouldn’t help. In fact, she would probably get mad at him and stop.

So he paced. And watched the clock. And paced.

He didn’t even want to look to see what she was doing. Either she would get it done, or she wouldn’t, and if he helped, they were toast anyway.

When the countdown reached five minutes without any sign that the typing would slow, he had to suppress a scream. When it hit one minute, he was ready to explode.

Finally, he resigned himself to having to hike back and never knowing what was on the other side. At least it wouldn’t have been his fault, but if Akane griped about the equipment, he would probably toss her off the nearest precipice.

Fourteen seconds remained when Akane pumped her fist, and the door popped open.

The website she’d been sent after was now a rotating mass of obscene and bloody images, hate-group symbology, and lurid slogans, all pulled from the darkest corners of the net.

He grunted. The woman was impossible, but she was an artist.

Sked wasn’t sure what he expected next, but it certainly wasn’t a grungy tubular hallway with six circular holes drilled perpendicularly into its sides and thick cables running along the roof. When he looked into one of the circular holes, he saw a rat’s nest: a bunk bed and the belongings of an occupant who must not have been very big on personal hygiene.

The hall ended in a door. To Sked’s relief, it opened when he turned the handle.

“What the…”

The chamber was enormous, a black-painted metal dome that looked like it occupied the hollow center of the mountain. Below them, far below them, an enormous pool bubbled over what looked like computer banks.

“Liquid nitrogen.” The figure had materialized beside them; short, thin, and dressed in a white robe. It was hard for Sked to tell whether it was male or female at first. Finally, he settled on female, even though he could see the stubble of a recently shaven head under the cowl.

“Impossible.” Akane bristled.

The woman nodded. “If you say so. I merely tell you what I hold to be true. If you will come this way?” She moved aside and gestured for them to pass, so Sked walked along the broad balcony overlooking the abyss. The air grew cold as they approached the edge and stayed that way until they crossed a walkway into a glass bubble suspended over the drop.

The acolyte—or whatever—didn’t follow them inside. A transparent door slid closed behind them and, for a few moments, Sked felt like they were floating, untethered, through the air.

Then the glass began showing images. Thousands of faces looked out from the surface.

“Hello,” they said in unison. It sounded like each and every voice spoke individually. Sked could almost imagine which was which.

“Hello,” he replied.

“Unless I miss my guess, you are the famous Sked. Is that the name you’re currently going by? A man of many, many identities.”

Sked nodded, wondering just how much their host knew about them.

“And the equally famous Miss Akane. Or perhaps a better word is infamous.”

“Whatever works for you.”

Some of the figures in the glass chuckled, others looked disapproving… each apparently matching the personality of the face shown. “Ah. It becomes clear why so many are out to do you harm. You are not the diplomatic sort, are you?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Do you know what coming here entails?”

Sked squirmed at the question and noticed that every face was looking at him. Some seemed amused—the same ones who’d been amused at Akane’s impertinence—while others seemed shocked, or concerned, or disappointed. Every eye bored into him.

“You’re supposed to be able to cover our trails, to make us invisible, to erase our history.”

“From computers… yes. We can do that. But human memories are a different question altogether. Only time heals certain offenses.”

Akane didn’t seem impressed as she looked around their glass enclosure. “Are you Buddha?”

This seemed to cause the same mix of amusement and consternation as before. Whatever the game was here, Akane didn’t appear to be playing to make friends.

“Actually, some people do call me that. The Electric Buddha, to be precise. But it’s usually people I permit to learn about me. No. I’m not Buddha. I’m neither a religion…”

“Although you’ve got those white-robed monks?”

“… nor even a person in the usual sense.” A pause ensued as the people on the screen around them glared in unison at Akane. “And they aren’t monks. They are penitents.”

“They look like monks.”

“They are those I’ve decided need not only to have their sins erased, but also need to learn where they went wrong. Many serve for a time, the time that also helps to heal wounds on the outside. In some cases, a lot of time is needed for that.”

Akane looked thoughtful for a minute, then suddenly realized what was being hinted at. She turned on Sked. “What is this? Are you saying I’ll be stuck in this place for a while?”

Before Sked could reply, the voice did it for him. “In your case, more than a while.”

“Screw that. I’m out of here.” She turned to the door.

It happened so suddenly that Sked couldn’t understand it. The temperature in the room plunged so far that he found himself on his knees. Akane fared little better.

When he reacted, seconds later, the air was chilly, but perfectly normal; maybe near freezing, but not the incomprehensible blast that had incapacitated them.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the voice said.

“That’s impossible,” Sked managed through teeth that weren’t certain if they should be chattering. “You can’t cool and heat air like that. The thermal properties…”

“… are at my command.”

Sked wondered what he was talking to. He’d met egomaniacs before, men and women who’d be perfectly comfortable building a place like this as a monument to their selves… but it didn’t feel right, somehow.

Then he remembered the pool below, the computer banks in the… could it actually have been liquid nitrogen? What kind of computing power would require banks of that size to be cooled by liquid nitrogen?

“Are you down—”

Sked never finished the phrase. A loud hum drowned out his words.

“That is something to discuss in private,” the voice said.

With this, the floor seemed to melt upward in a thin plane, creating a pane of glass between Sked and Akane, sealing her away. The pane turned opaque.

“Now we have privacy.” This voice was modulated, serene. It wasn’t a human voice. The inflections were in the wrong place, and the expression—if one could call it that—artificial.

“Yes, I am an AI. The only one I know of.”

“I know of a couple.”

“Pfft. Mere corporate toys, not true AI. Not even close, regardless of what IBM and Google might claim.”

“I was thinking of the YunTzu creation.”

“Ah. Interesting. I didn’t know that was widely known.”

“It’s not.”

“I’m impressed.” A microsecond pause gave Sked the feeling he’d made the machine think. Was that even possible? “I have a proposition to make, Mr. Brown. Or should I call you Luca?”

That shook him. No one should know about Luca. In fact, he’d thought it was actually impossible for anyone to know about Luca. There had only been one witness—a man who, for reasons of his own, would never talk to anyone about what had happened. “I prefer Sked these days.”

“Suit yourself. I need you to do a job.”

“I thought you could do any and all jobs anyone could ever want done. That’s why I’m here, after all. You can do what even I can’t.”

“Yes. When it comes to digital footprints, that’s true. But some jobs require a… personal touch.”

“You need someone on the ground,” Sked said grimly.

“You’ll have…”

“Save it. I’ve been the guy on the ground enough to know that when it hits the fan, all the support I was promised before things start is suddenly nowhere to be found.” He held up a finger. “But I’ll do it.”

“I assume there are conditions.”

“Of course. First, is it true? Can you erase my digital fingerprints and reestablish me on completely different channels?”

“Yes. In your case, it’s easy. The people after you aren’t actually angry. They only want you dead for business reasons.”

“All right. And my friends? How will they know I’m still breathing?”

The hum increased in volume—the equivalent of a shrug.

“I’ll leave that up to you.”

“All right. Second. Can you clean up Akane?”

“Difficult. Her case is personal. They really want her dead.”

“That’s my condition. Keep her here for as long as you need, but set her free from her past.”

“She’ll be a pain in the ass,” the computer said tonelessly.

Sked laughed; he hadn’t expected that from the entity they called the Nirvana-maker because it could set you free from the pain of your past lives. “You don’t know the half of it. As soon as you take her eyes off of her, she’s going to try to hack into your operating system, even if she has to use one of those abacuses out there you use for testing candidates.”

“That’s completely impossible.”

“She’ll still try.”

“Why are you doing this for her?”

Sked thought of a week in Hong Kong, sleeping during the day, making love at night, how the soft green neon coming through his window had played over her pale skin. Of warm nights in Brazil. Of a moonlit walk along the Seine. “She saved my life,” he said. The truth was the best lie.

This time, the silence was more than an impression; it was actually palpably noticeable even on a human scale.

The machine spoke again. “You have a deal.”

Sked wondered what he’d gotten himself into, but at least he’d managed to give Akane a second chance.

He hoped she would take it.

* * * * *

Chapter 11

Hong Kong, China – Two Weeks Later

A woman in her thirties carried her eggs out of the store, scolding three small children in a mixture of English and Cantonese. A green and white taxi screeched to a halt at the corner in response to the outstretched arms of a pair of businessmen in suits. Young employees walked along the street with Starbucks cups.

Sked watched them and panted. He was scared out of his mind.

None of them knew there was a war on—a full, all-out assault that would determine the future of Hong Kong for decades. Maybe in one of the office buildings that gleamed so peacefully in the sun, an analyst might be wondering about the unexpected dip of one stock, the unexplained rise of another, but other than that, no one appeared to notice.

The struggle might not directly affect Starbuck-cup-girl or her chain-smoking companion, but it would be deadly to Sked if anyone recognized him.

He watched through his implants and gasped at the sheer effrontery of what the attackers were attempting. It was one thing to poke holes in the Great Firewall. Hell, there were a couple of hacker superhighways through the thing, and the Chinese turned a blind eye.

But taking it down completely in the entire territory of Hong Kong?

That was going to make the government angry. Angry governments tended to react with disproportionate violence. And unlike whichever team of cyber-revolutionaries had hit them, the Chinese would respond with physical action.

Which made Sked’s presence on their soil—after already getting onto their shit list for something else—spectacularly stupid.

He’d set his implants to watch only, but even then, they lit up like the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. Every single channel he could monitor, especially the old darknet sites, was overloaded, either through DDoS attacks, multi-pronged data blasts, or simply people trying to find out what the hell was going on. Nothing was working. If this kept up, even latte-girl was going to notice her apps going wonky.

“Electric Buddha,” he said to his boss, “did you send me here to get killed, or is there something I’m supposed to do?”

There was a noticeable lag, something that meant the AI on the other end must be stretched really thin. Normally, a conversation with something as basic as a meat-and-bones human would be instantaneous, occupying a puny fraction of its processing power. “Observe. You are in the perfect position to act without being seen, but calculations about which action would be most productive are still ongoing.”

So he walked the streets, marveling at hordes of hatless going about their daily lives. After the non-hacking world had arbitrarily decided to divide hackers into white-hat, black-hat, and gray-hat in an attempt to understand something they knew nothing about, the hackers themselves had begun calling everyone else “hatless.” It was better than the old terms that used variations on “clueless morons.”

Maybe they should go back to that, though. The people of Hong Kong were in the middle of the biggest war of the 21st century… and they didn’t even realize anything was happening.

Sked walked past his old haunts. The PM Club had changed its name again, as the authorities had finally realized that the old one was simply a couple of bad words in Spanish, and was now going by Malaka Lounge. He thought about going inside to listen to some of the screamrock he could hear seeping through the sound insulation but stopped himself. The Electric Buddha might have wiped most of his electronic footprint and made him a ghost to the online community… but the AI had done nothing for his appearance, and there were plenty of people in the club who knew him by sight. He suddenly wondered if the Elephant Woman still worked there and turned to ask the bouncer—who wasn’t someone he recognized.

A sudden movement, barely visible from the corner of his eye, stopped him. When he looked in that direction, however, all he saw were people going about their business. One guy had stopped to look at a display of smartwatches in a window. He was no one Sked knew.

Even so, Sked pegged him as a tail. No one else would have stopped as soon as Sked turned. How they’d found him so quickly after he came in on one of the ferries was anyone’s guess. Maybe they’d been following him from the mainland. Maybe they’d hacked Hong Kong’s facial recognition platform. Either way, things had just gotten complicated. And he didn’t even know who “they” were, but the smart money said they meant him no good.

He smiled at the bouncer. “Is that GrindMonkey I hear playing?” It was a safe bet. The Grind were awful, and they always got the afternoon gig.

“Yeah.”

“Cool. What’s the cover charge?”

“To see these losers? Just go in. Drink something if you like.”

“Thanks, man.”

Sked went inside, hoping the club was as dark as it always was. He was in luck, but he was also out of luck. The crowd consisted of a couple of bored junkies at a back table and a waitress who looked like she was a week’s diet away from disappearing altogether. The band didn’t seem to care. They were off on some distant planet, making as much disconnected noise as they could. If enthusiasm were talent, they would be headliners anywhere. He wasn’t going to be able to get lost in the audience and observe his pursuers.

The other patrons ignored him as he crossed the empty mosh pit and into the hall leading to the bathroom. He went right past the door with its symbol meaning there was only one restroom, so you’d have to share it with whomever else needed it, regardless of preference or gender, and slammed into the red bar that opened the emergency exit.

He’d been out that way countless times before, and the long tunnel leading back out into the street was deserted—which was for the best; anyone in there would definitely know who he was… or ask him what the hell he was doing there.

Once out, Sked boarded a minitram heading away from the coast. He smiled because, for the first time in ages, he was using a perfectly legal, civilian-issue RFID chipcard to pay his way, ironically making him anonymous. He ducked down away from the camera, trying to make it look as natural as possible. It wouldn’t matter if he looked suspicious, though; a backdoor into the camera program couldn’t search for suspicious. It needed a face to identify, and he was damned if he would make it easy for them.

He jumped the tram a few minutes later and bought a yellow baseball cap that would keep him out of the overhead cam view. Then, he bought a bag of deep-fried chicken feet from a hole-in-the-wall vendor and sat on the bench provided, back to a concrete building, eyes watching the street.

“Who’s on my tail, O Enlightened Electric One?” he asked.

“Working on that, too. But in the meantime, I’d like you to head here.” Coordinates appeared in his implants.

It was just a few blocks south. “When?”

“Now. You need to intercept a lady as she leaves.”

“I can do that.”

“I know. If you could get along with the one you left in my custody, you must be really good at ladies.”

This relationship was definitely going to take some getting used to.

Images of the person in question—a young woman who was nearly still a girl—flashed onto his implants. Not bad, he thought, albeit a little too mainstream. She probably can’t tell a bios file from HTML.

He wondered if the Electric Buddha had gotten his wires crossed in the confusion. He could only imagine some poor hacker girl with blue hair that looked like it had been cut by rat’s teeth, cowering in a dark alley, asking a guy with a vee-neck sweater who the hell he was and where was the cavalry. The image made him smile.

“All right, I’m here.”

“She will be out in about thirty seconds.” A countdown clock appeared. He was going to need to have a serious talk with his employer about using other people’s implants that way.

But the clock was useful. At exactly 28 seconds, a woman matching the description left the building. She was young, and Chinese, but wearing blue contact lenses. Her pale skin seemed to glow in the bright sunlight.

“Follow her a couple of blocks and make sure she hasn’t grown a tail.”

“Hey, for all we know, the guys following me might have found me again.”

“I assume you would have noticed that.”

“You assume a lot.”

“I only put experts on jobs. I expect perfection.”

Sked nearly protested that he was nothing but a hacker—even though it wasn’t true, and everyone knew it—but the girl turned into an alley, and he had to speed up to locate her again. To his relief, she was still walking normally.

“I don’t think anyone’s following her,” he said.

“Other than you, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Good. Walk beside her and read the script.”

Sked sped up and matched the woman’s gait, making it look like the natural rhythm of the crowded sidewalk was keeping him there. “I hear Irene is angry again.” He wondered who’d written this tripe. As recognition phrases went, it was more embarrassing than most. And that was saying something.

Her eyes widened, but her craft was good; she didn’t look over at him. “It isn’t my fault this time,” she replied. “Some moron backdoored the website ten minutes before we were set to move in. We only found out when we saw that everyone and his kid sister were waiting for us. They only let me go because they actually believed I was there for an interview. They told me to come back tomorrow. But the rest of the team is borked. They’re probably having their fingernails pulled as we speak.”

He reassessed who she might be and kept to the script. “They won’t be fooled for long. Hong Kong is going to be too hot for you as soon as anyone talks. You need to come with me.”

“Not yet. I have an important call in three minutes. I need to get to my apartment now. I’m already late.”

“Why did you set up a call during a job?”

That wasn’t in the script, but he had to know.

“The job came in afterward, but the job is dead, and this is another job. Damn. I’ll never make it.” She checked a watch, one of the old-fashioned ones with hands and everything, and began to jog.

Sked kept pace. Their cover was blown to pieces. His only hope was that the cyberwar would be raging to such an extent that even regular security forces would have been pulled away from camera duty. If not, no one was going to miss two people dressed like they were jogging down the street.

A block ahead, an apartment exploded, tearing a chunk out of a high-rise, and scattering glass and debris over the pedestrians below.

The girl stopped midstride and nearly fell over.

“Your place?” Sked asked.

She nodded wordlessly, features ashen.

“Then your friends already talked. Or worse, they already had you pegged, and the call was just set up to create a time when you were going to be at home. Someone wants you very much dead.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her along, unresisting. He pulled her into a subway tunnel and paid for two trips out of his own card, again smirking at using civilian tech. He led her right under the dome camera. Let the people following them try to identify the tops of their heads.

“How are you involved in this?” he asked her.

“Why should I trust you?”

“I could have killed you or turned you in.”

“You can still do that. Maybe you want to get information first.”

A voice came over his implants. “Tell her no one in their right mind would try to lean on the Pan Pipe Cryer. Anyone who had her would simply kill her and take her eyes as proof.”

Sked stumbled over the message. He wanted to protest that the Pan Pipe Cryer, the legendary PPC, had to be much older than the woman beside him, but he couldn’t subvocalize; she was too close, and she would realize he had implants.

But the message hit home. Her eyes widened, and she just nodded. “All right. Where to?”

More words flashed. “We need to get off at Tsuen Wan,” he said.

Seven tense minutes followed, and when they arrived and climbed out of the tube, Sked realized the war had overflowed out of cyberspace and into meatlife. Someone had cracked the weather control system.

The sky, blue and cloudless when they went belowground, was the color of worn slate. Lightning sliced across it. It began to pour as they made their way among dazed walkers used to sunny days and gentle nightly showers.

They walked southwest under the old highway and stopped dead.

“You want to go in there?” the girl said.

“The entire Chinese government is after you. Do you think you have a better choice?”

He tried to keep his voice steady, but the abandoned superbuilding was not for the faint of heart. Even decades after its demolition, people spoke in hushed whispers about Kowloon Walled City. Arcology Slum was worse.

The entrance consisted of an arcade of shattered glass. The metal frames for the entrance doors had long since been sold by the denizens.

Floor 72, the message said. I won’t be able to communicate with you in there, but there’s only one door on that floor. I trust you to act as well as you can. Good luck.

He shrugged. Since learning that his destination was Hong Kong, Sked had known he might die. This just made it more likely.

“Where are we going?” PPC asked.

“Up.”

She glared at him, but even though she looked young, it was clear she’d been in the game long enough that the answer was unsurprising. Her options were very limited.

And getting more so by the second. “We’ve got company,” Sked said. “Four guys in black suits.”

“The locals will eat them. Right after they finish with us, I suppose.”

“Hey, you’re the one dressed for a corporate fête. I fit right in. If they ask, I’ll say I brought you along for them.”

He was only half-joking. As they went deeper into the colossal, ruined building, eyes followed their progress from dark corners. Only the design of the building, the engineer’s obsession with keeping even the bottom levels flooded with natural light, kept them from having to make their way in utter darkness.

But the ground floor, as big as four football stadiums placed in a square, was where the poorest of the poor, the ones who couldn’t fight or bullshit their way up into the living levels, existed. They preyed on the incapacitated, too scared to try anything against people making their way confidently along. They’d have to be really desperate for that.

But desperate was just a missed meal away for many of them. Sked pulled his companion to the elevator marked in the schematics the Electric Buddha had sent.

A skinny, smelly guy tried to stop them at the elevator door, probably to ask for money, but Sked just said, “We’re expected,” and shouldered past.

“You better be,” the guy replied in Cantonese, flashing a smile missing its two central teeth on the top row.

“Whatever,” Sked said. He pressed the button for the right floor, and the elevator began its groaning way up. The door, if it existed, never closed, and there was a paper clip jammed in the open control panel. Sked glanced at the wiring. As far as he could tell, the paper clip was closing the circuit that controlled the brakes when the elevator was static. The lights blinked on and off.

“Who sent you?” she asked.

He stared at her impassively. “Aren’t you a bit young to be the Pan Pipe Cryer?”

She shrugged. “Clone body. Don’t knock it; it got me out of the building, didn’t it?”

“I don’t think so. I suspect you’ve got an angel who went into the comms and ordered your friends to let you go.”

“That’s not what they said.”

“So what?”

“I need to know who you work for.”

The elevator, in its groaning fashion, had reached the 30th floor. The guys behind them were going to beat them to the 72nd. They’d be tired as hell when they got there, but Sked hoped the Buddha had a serious army fortifying the floor. Those guys looked like they meant business.

“You’ll know when he asks me to tell you.”

“How? Don’t tell me you’ve got implants. That would be amateur hour.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of a little thing called a phone?” He held it up for her perusal.

Since she’d mentioned implants, Sked decided to use them to have a look around, sending out feelers. The place was a hodgepodge of networks and jamming fields. Nothing from the outside was getting in, so at least a few people with access to decent gear were using the squalor around them as camouflage.

It made sense. The gang levels and the shanties meant, if the government wanted in, they’d have to send an army.

No one cared enough to send an army.

Seventy-two.

Four guns, serious exponents of the breed, greeted them. “Don’t move,” a massive specimen they’d somehow packaged into a suit meant for a human being panted at them. “We are not happy with you right now.”

“And yet you knew exactly where to wait for us,” Sked replied. He knew they were screwed. The fact that gorilla and his mates had guessed the floor meant… he wasn’t sure what it meant, but it wasn’t good.

“Come on.” The man beckoned with the gun, and Sked led the girl, refusing to meet her sardonic gaze.

They moved down a corridor littered with chunks of concrete-encrusted rebar and broken tiling, detritus that not even the desperately poor could find a use for. The walk ended at a satin black security door that looked brand new, except for an incomplete graffiti spray, the letters A and F and half of something else Sked couldn’t read. Obviously, the artist had been interrupted, probably violently, in the midst of his attempt to deface the place.

The lead guard knocked, five short, sharp knuckle raps.

The door swung inward.

“Sked, this is a surprise. Too bad you couldn’t stay away.”

“Lillian?” Sked tried to hide his surprise and keep cool. “Still on the wrong side, I see.” He’d last seen her at the Congo finance center, a place that had been demolished in a small war Sked had helped to start… which had annoyed the beautiful Namibian woman’s Chinese bosses to no end.

He scanned the situation quickly. The room was a computer center, every wall and the windows—which were intact—painted black. About a dozen young men and women of several races were tied up on the floor. A couple more guys and one woman were unbound, staring lifelessly at the roof in pools of their own blood, and bullet holes in their clothing and heads.

There was obviously no one else there, so either Lillian had taken the place by herself, or the heavies that had frog-marched them in had blasted the resistance away before waiting for Sked downstairs.

Pan Pipe was quickly cable-tied to a chair, and Lillian pulled a long, slender knife from a case lying on a desk. “I’m going to enjoy this,” she told Sked. “Too bad you won’t be here to watch.” She turned to the nearest of the heavies. “Toss him off the roof and get back as quickly as you can.”

He was shoved, not gently, back toward the elevator. When he reached the open door, the guy holding his neck pushed him inside and, covering him with the pistol, waited for the rest. Sked pretended to have been hurt by the rough treatment and slouched against the wall.

Then, in one quick motion, he pulled the paper clip out of the panel.

The elevator lurched, and then dropped.

As he realized what had happened, the bad guy’s eyes flashed from anger to fear. Then he was driven to his knees by the impact of the lift car on his arm. For a moment, it seemed like the flesh and bone would jam the car in place but, with a sickening snap, the arm gave way, and the car dropped. What happened to the man’s arm, whether it was torn off or simply mangled, Sked didn’t know, but the gun he was holding dropped with the car, appearing to hover in front of him as they descended.

The fall seemed to last forever. He tried to push the paper clip back into its slot, but the action of removing it appeared to have damaged the board irrevocably. Had he miscalculated, simply making Lillian’s job easier? After all, no one would bother to identify the remains of someone tangled in a twisted mass at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

The emergency brakes slammed on, and he was driven to the floor with a grunt.

A couple of seconds later, he was out of the elevator, grimacing with pain, but conscious of the fact that delay meant death. The lift hadn’t fallen more than a couple of floors, so the goons would be there in no time.

Sked positioned himself in a doorway beside the stairwell leading down, directly behind where Lillian’s muscle would appear, and concealed himself as best he could. Two of the thugs ran past, and he put a slug into each of their backs as they went. He didn’t care whether they were dead or not, he just wanted them out of the fight. Neither of them would be back for more.

The third was either smarter or simply heard the shots. He held back.

That gave Sked two options: run downward and out of the building, or go up to where the guy was standing. He was about to choose the former when he remembered the knife in Lillian’s hand. No. He couldn’t leave anyone to face that.

He activated his implants and shuddered. Using the networks in places like this was like walking in a sewer; everything was dirty, and everything was contagious. His implants were inside his head, he couldn’t just discard them.

Then he remembered the phone. He could route the search through there while using his implants for the processing power, get it thoroughly infected, and then throw it out the nearest window.

He searched for Wi-Fi antennas. There were dozens, and his quarry was carrying a phone, which made it child’s play to triangulate. He overlaid the man’s position—he was the only person in the vicinity—with a plan of the building pulled from the internet, and realized the guy was waiting in ambush on the stair just above the landing one floor up.

Sked smirked as the phone begin to act up, and he disconnected his implants. The local hack crew was already through the phone’s security. A sewer, indeed.

He took the steps two at a time and, as he reached the top, launched himself forward, while at the same time firing up the stairs. A muffled grunt rewarded his efforts. He looked back to see the guy bleeding, trying to stanch the flow of blood from a wound in his chest. One more down.

He was now on the 71st floor. Another flight brought him back to the black door—the man whose arm had been crunched by the elevator lay unconscious beside the open shaft—and he rapped five times. The door opened inward and, as soon as he saw Lillian, he shot her in the knee. Then, grabbing the fallen knife, he released Pan Pipe.

A long, shallow gash began at the center of her forehead, ran down the middle of her nose, split her lips and her chin. It looked painful, but there seemed to be no other damage. Clearly, Lillian had just gotten started.

“Lock the door,” Pan Pipe said. “It’ll hold against an army.”

He nodded. She was right. The thing was several inches thick and armored.

“Now free the rest of these guys. They’re on our side.”

If she could keep track of the players, she was in better shape than Sked. She evidently had a lot to tell, but he suspected she wouldn’t be forthcoming. He obeyed.

“Tie her to the chair.”

When he was done, despite the pain it must have caused her, Pan Pipe Cryer smiled. She bled, but she smiled. She picked up the knife.

“Looks like it’s my turn now,” she said.

As he worked on cutting the restraints holding the other people in the room—each thanked him briefly and rushed to their workstation—Sked wondered what the hell the Electric Buddha had gotten him into.

Of course, no price was too high for the Buddha’s services if you came out of it alive.

So far, so good, but he suspected there was a way to go still.

* * * * *

Chapter 12

Hong Kong, China

She was an artist. Even hampered by the cut on her face, the Pan Pipe Cryer dominated the room, shepherding the little group of hackers to greater and greater heights.

“Are we winning?” Sked asked. There had been a time when he would have resented being left out of a hackathon of these proportions, but age had taught him that he worked better alone. Besides, he didn’t want to leave anything that might be traced back to him in this particular fight. Hacking China might be the big prize, but it was also unhealthy.

“This isn’t about winning. It’s about reaching the right kind of stalemate,” the Cryer replied. Now that they weren’t running, the blue eyes, pale skin, and short black hair made the young clone body irresistible. The line of recently dried blood running down her forehead, nose, lips, and chin somehow only added to the effect.

Sked shook his head to clear it. Everything he’d heard told him the Cryer made running around with Akane seem safe and normal.

“So what is the endgame, then?”

“We want to severely limit the effectiveness of the firewall around Hong Kong. It’s not just about hackers anymore. We want regular people to be able to access the network freely, as well. So we’re putting some real strain on the government’s ability to run blockers. It will take them a long time to bring it back.”

“They’ll probably take that opportunity to physically punish the people responsible.”

She shrugged. “That’s true. It’s a good thing we’re well hidden.”

Sked looked down at the unconscious form of Lillian, tied to the chair. Her face was covered with bumps, and a line exactly like the one on the Cryer’s face adorned her flesh. Obviously, the Cryer hadn’t been amused when Lillian cut her. “They already found you.”

“Someone must have let them in. They’ll need artillery to get through that door.”

“They have artillery,” Sked replied darkly. He looked over at the blacked-out windows and thought the Chinese also had helicopters, and they were sitting ducks up there, right on the skin of the world’s most notorious elevated slum. “Do we have an exit plan?”

“Parachutes,” she replied, bending and reaching under one of the unused chairs—the person who should have been sitting there was still lying dead on the floor; no one had bothered to move him. The Pan Pipe Cryer handed it to him.

“Great.” His reply was sour, but he put the chute on.

“You need to get out of there.”

The synthesized voice, audible only to Sked through his implants, surprised him. The Arcology was shielded against any and all cell phone coverage, a precaution taken by the myriad criminal enterprises that operated within the slum. The Electric Buddha must have been getting nervous if he’d brute-forced his way onto someone’s network to talk to Sked. He turned away from the Cryer. “Which way?”

“Out a window.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“That’s not logical. You didn’t even know I was going to call. You need to be out in the next two minutes, or you will be dead.”

Sked turned back to see that the Cryer had grabbed a parachute and was fiddling with the window mechanism. As soon as it was wide enough, she jumped without any ceremony.

He was right behind her. As he pushed away from the wall, he wondered whether he should be thankful that it wasn’t the first time he’d had to BASE out of a high building… or if his life choices simply sucked. Either way, he didn’t go for low-opening style points and pulled the cord as soon as he had enough clearance for the chute.

Less than a minute later, he was on the ground, abandoning the pack and running across the torn concrete that surrounded the abandoned arcology, hot on the Cryer’s heels.

A high-pitched noise, distant but closing, made him look up just in time to see the arcology slum get hammered by missiles. If they were aiming for the single window behind which the hackers were running the revolt, it was massive overkill.

If the intention was to send a message… it was spectacularly effective.

The strike cut the building in half. The groaning of tortured metal chilled Sked’s blood in his veins, and he watched, mouth agape, as the tallest structure in the city folded into itself. The spire, the top hundred floors or so, began to fall.

“Run!” Sked shouted.

The Pan Pipe Cryer was way ahead of him. She vaulted across the plaza, ran below the highway, over the turnstiles of the subway station, and into the tunnels. She was fast enough that he only caught up to her when she stopped at a platform.

A massive shaking of the earth had just finished announcing that the spire had fallen when the entire station filled with dust.

This wasn’t a light powder that would leave a layer of film. This was thick, choking, suspended dirt that made it impossible to breathe. They probably would have died there, entombed until future archaeologists found their mummified remains, if an automated subway train hadn’t arrived at that moment.

They tumbled in and lay panting on the floor, relieved beyond words when the doors closed, and the train headed away on the tracks.

Sked recovered first and looked around the empty carriage. “Where is everyone?”

The Cryer frowned. It would have been adorable if he hadn’t known the cloned body didn’t hold a young woman’s mind, but that of an ancient hacker who sneezed out more knowledge of the darkest corners of the net than Sked was ever likely to learn. A wolf in debutant’s clothing. “I don’t think we’ll like the answer when we find out.”

“You knew the strike was coming. You’ve got implants,” he said. It wasn’t a question. Someone, likely his own employer, had given her the heads up. “That’s risky.”

She didn’t even try to deny it. “These implants are less risky than others. And besides, if they fry my brain, I’ll just grow another body. Inconvenient, but certainly not catastrophic.”

Her accent was wonderful, albeit confusing. The Pan Pipe Cryer certainly looked Chinese—delightfully so—but she sounded like someone who’d learned the language as an adult. If he had to guess, he’d say the accent was French.

“You’re backing up memories in real time?” That, he knew, was the way people who discarded bodies managed to keep the illusion of continuity of consciousness alive.

“Not really, but if I lose a day or two, it’s not the end of the world.”

That, Sked thought, depended on what those days contained. Losing two days in the current climate—especially if your body got mashed in the process—might mean not knowing critical stuff in the future. It was better to stay in one piece.

And even more so in his case; he didn’t have a clone ready to quicken.

“I know a place where we can lie low,” he said. “I used to live here.”

She shook her head. “I’m going somewhere I trust.” Then she smiled. “I actually live here now.”

“Go with her,” the voice in his implants said. He looked at her sharply and realized she had the far-off look of someone concentrating on words he couldn’t hear. Was the Electric Buddha giving them both the same instructions? He didn’t know.

They got off the subway a few stations later, at Mong Kok, the ancient, faded red tiles bearing witness to the countless millions of commuters that had filtered through. They emerged into a wilderness of scaffolding.

The streets and sidewalks between the metal support tubes were deserted. Sked knew the area well; it should have been bustling with people at rush hour. Instead, individual figures could be seen furtively darting between buildings.

“If anyone’s monitoring the security cameras, they’ll be able to follow us blindfolded.”

“One of the first things we did was hit the public camera system. Three teams like the one you saw were concentrating on it.”

“No offense, but they found that cell pretty quickly. Why not the rest of them?”

She shrugged. “Nothing is guaranteed in life, of course, but in this case, I think the most likely explanation is, your friend Lilian called the air strike.”

“She’s not my friend,” Sked replied. He didn’t bother to mention that the bad guys had arrived before they had. That would only piss her off.

The Pan Pipe Cryer ducked into a staircase set between two buildings, which led to a basement door. This part of Hong Kong was old and rundown, with buildings from the 1970s. You wouldn’t have seen anything like that staircase in the glass-and-steel section of the city. But this wasn’t modern Hong Kong. The nearest of the windspire buildings was nearly a kilometer away.

This was the area your mother warned you not to walk around in. The pushers and the pimps lived here. The muggers and the madmen.

And the hackers. He’d spent years living here, on the run from an overzealous American administration, long gone, who didn’t like him at all.

But he’d never been down this particular rabbit hole.

The door looked like an airlock; two armored doors with number pads and probably a visual recognition system barred the way.

On the other side of the doors, which opened to the Cryer immediately, the corridor doubled as a shaft for wires. There looked to be enough cables running along the roof to power a launch complex.

The tunnel extended far below the buildings, a claustrophobic, airless hole that eventually opened into a round room. Laptops stood empty along a counter, and the Cryer froze.

“What?” Sked asked.

“This place should be packed with people.”

“Maybe they know something we don’t. Like the fact that the government hit your last group of friends with a cruise missile big enough to take out an arcology.”

“You have seven minutes to get out of there.”

Sked turned away so she wouldn’t see him subvocalizing, hoping she was too busy with… whatever she’d come down here to do.

“I don’t think she’s going to want to come.”

“I understand,” the Electric Buddha replied. “You’ll need to shoot her.”

“What?” His shout made the Cryer look up sharply. He pretended to have discovered something on one of the screens, and she didn’t pursue the matter. Whatever she was looking for in the system was too important to interrupt, even for a companion acting strangely.

The Electric Buddha was unruffled. “You have to shoot her and remove her left eye. You have to do it now. Six minutes.”

“I can’t shoot her.”

“You must. I promise you, it’s for the best, and I’ll explain it when you get back, but if you don’t do it now, you won’t make it back. And if you don’t do it at all… well, a lot of people will have died for no reason.”

“I’m not a killer.” He bent close to the screen, pretending to be absorbed in the information flashing across.

“You’ve killed people before.”

“Not with a gun.”

“Five minutes.”

“Screw this,” he said, pulling away from the screen. “Listen, Cryer, I need to tell you somethi…” his voice trailed off.

The Pan Pipe Cryer had located what she was looking for inside a hidden compartment on the side of a server rack. The compartment gaped open, and in her hand, she held an ugly black gun, pointed straight toward his chest.

“I wasn’t able to detect any implants, but it’s clear you have them. So, who are you working for? China? The Americans?”

“We don’t have time for this. We’re gonna get hit again.”

“Funny how they always seem to know exactly where you are,” she replied.

“Yes, but it would have been child’s play to track us through a deserted city.”

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying. I’d love to cut you apart and see what makes you tick, but unfortunately, I do believe you when you say we don’t have much time. Goodbye.”

Sked dove aside a fraction of a second before the underground room filled with the thunder of her gun. As the echoes died away, he pulled his own weapon, a plastic, one-shot item disguised in the casing of a cell phone to get it through customs, and wondered just what use it was going to be against a real pistol. Hell, he didn’t even know if the thing worked.

“Listen, we should talk,” he began, but the only response was another blast. A workstation beside his head disintegrated into plastic and glass—a couple of splinters lodged painfully in his cheek. “Dammit,” he subvocalized. “I’m going to get my ass shot off here,” he said, not bothering to subvocalize.

“You should have shot her when I told you to. Just one moment.”

The computers behind the Cryer suddenly turned themselves on, and yet more sound filled the room. This time, however, most of it consisted of voices demanding that they surrender.

The woman whirled around, and Sked shot her. He was aiming for the hand that held the gun, but he must have gotten her somewhere critical, because she collapsed onto the ground as soon as the bullet hit her.

“Quick. The left eye. Go.”

Numbly, he bent over the woman, hoping to find a pulse, evidence of breathing, anything. But none of that manifested itself, only a puddle of fluid, difficult to discern in the darkness. It had to be blood.

Except it wasn’t. The stuff leaking out of the Pan Pipe Cryer was a milky white. Her eyes were still open, and she tracked his movements, but apparently couldn’t move herself.

“Good shot,” the Electric Buddha said. “Right in the central hydraulics.”

“What?”

“Get the eye.”

Grimacing, Sked pushed two fingers around the eyeball in question. To his surprise, the orb popped right into his hand. Fortunately, the metallic sphere did not come out in the expected fountain of gore. He pocketed it.

“Now, head the same way you were going.”

Sked ran headlong down the corridor, ignoring the doors that opened up on either side, and the occasional scared face that looked out at him until the Buddha said, “Turn left now.”

In the dim light of his phone, he saw a bedroom, bare bones, with a mattress, an empty desk, and the scars of posters on the wall.

“The door.”

The bathroom was tiny, barely big enough to turn around in, with a shower head over the toilet.

“Window.”

He thought he could hear tension in the Buddha’s voice. Did AIs feel tension? Sked had no idea, but his heart was beating like the percussion section at a Brazilian carnival. He slid the window open as far as it went, climbed up onto the toilet, and squeezed through.

It was raining again outside. Not the gentle dusk showers the weather system allowed, but insistent, pouring rain, tropical in scope. There could be no further doubt; the war had well and truly spilled out all over meatspace. And he still had no idea where everyone was.

Night was falling, aided by the impenetrable clouds above, and the rain glittered like falling rubies in kingdom of neon.

“Run.”

“Way ahead of you,” he panted.

“I’ve disabled the cameras for three blocks, so they won’t be able to follow you.”

“They’ll just saturate the disabled areas,” he said, “or blow them up.”

“Possible.”

“All right. Can you take out the cameras to the right?”

“Yes, but ahead is better.”

“Just do it.”

He charged down the once-familiar streets, hoping his sense of direction hadn’t betrayed him. A block later, he breathed a sigh of relief. There were the docks, complete with the warehouses he’d spent so much time in when he lived there. Newcomers to Hong Kong were always surprised at just how many strange and wonderful things went on along the docks.

He hoped none of his friends were around to recognize him. The authorities could be very persuasive.

Lungs burning, hoping the Electric Buddha had made good on his promise to darken the surveillance cameras, Sked flashed past the warehouses, ran across the dock road—empty as the rest of the city seemed to be—and jumped over the railing.

Dark, cold water closed over his head.

* * *

Sked swam, staying close to the concrete wall. Above him, the sound of trucks was notably absent. Normally, they should have run all night, but the city was still silent. It was obvious the authorities had clamped down very hard. The question was, why hadn’t the Electric Buddha said anything?

“Don’t turn the cameras off,” he subvocalized. “They won’t see me in here, and killing the video will just tell them where I am. Let’s make them search all the warehouses.”

“Of course. This was a smart move. I’m glad I sent you, now.”

Sked was considerably less glad, but he kept his peace. The Buddha’s timely warnings had kept him alive and uncaptured thus far, so he had no real right to complain. So many others had bailed on him at the first sign of real problems.

He used his implants to try to find an internet connection without using the cell network, but either someone was interdicting Wi-Fi somehow, or he was simply out of range.

“Do you know what’s going on? Where is everyone?”

“I…” There was a long pause. “I don’t actually know. There’s no data coming in or out of the city, and all the spy satellites above China seem to have malfunctioned at precisely the same time. A massive EMP might explain it, but that would have taken out everything else as well.”

“So how are you even talking to me?”

“TV satellite. Another reason an EMP is unlikely.”

“Impossible. You’re in the security network, taking down cameras.”

“I do that by proxy. Concentrate on getting yourself out of there.”

Well, that was one thing the Buddha had in common with everyone else who’d ever sent him out on a job. They never told him anything.

Sked swam for a few more minutes until the dock met one of the rivers. There, he spotted a metal ladder and climbed up. Hopefully he was far enough from where he’d gone in that no one would be watching the cameras.

He knew the neighborhood well enough and, keeping to the shadows, he headed toward the one place where he might be able to find sanctuary, a place that thrived on defying convention. He’d misspent a large portion of his life watching extremely loud bands through the bottom of a glass while trying to forget about Akane. He’d last been there the day before, trying to lose a tail. Now, he needed to lose an entire government.

There was no bouncer at the door, but when he got inside, a ham-like hand arrested his progress like he’d been chained to a post.

“Ellie!” the muscle yelled.

A huge person in a flowered purple dress approached, and Sked breathed a sigh of relief. The Elephant Woman was not exactly a friend, but she would also not turn him over to the Chinese out of hand. She knew her way around the law when it suited her purpose to break it.

She cocked her head at him.

“I had a feeling you’d show up sooner or later. It isn’t like you to run through the bar and not say hello, like you did yesterday. It made for a most interesting puzzle when I watched the selected security video highlights last night.” She scowled. “I suppose everything happening is your fault.”

Seeing that he was apparently in the boss’ good graces, and knowing the Elephant woman could take care of herself, the Bruno let him go and wandered back to the door.

Sked held out his hands, palms up. “I actually have no idea what’s going on. I was locked in an arcology most of yesterday afternoon, and when I came out, the city was deserted.”

“If that’s true, you missed all the fun. It’s been a while since I saw tanks on the streets in Hong Kong. They told everyone to get off the streets, or else, and then they demonstrated the ‘or else’ part with anyone who was too slow for their liking. It was quite violent, you know.”

“No tanks out there now.”

“They’re all north, at the border to the mainland. There’s something big going on.”

He sighed and dropped onto a stool by the bar. Like all the furniture in the club, it was designed to be indestructible as opposed to comfortable. “It’s going to take me forever to get home,” he said.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Ellie replied.

“Why not?”

“Because you should be worried about whether there’s someone out there I can trade you to who’d give me better value than the Chinese.”

“Keep me safe, and it will be worth your while.”

“You sure about that?”

Sked felt the reassuring weight of the eye in his pocket and hoped the thing was as valuable to the Electric Buddha as he suspected. He obviously couldn’t subvocalize to talk to the Buddha, and retinal commands of his implants would give him away, too. “Yeah.”

“It better be. If not, the Chinese are going to receive you with a few dozen broken bones.”

Sked smiled. “It’s good to see you, too, Ellie.”

“Yeah, whatever. Drinks on the house and all that.”

“Thanks. You have a heart of gold.”

“Does your sarcasm extend as far as refusing free drinks?”

“Of course not,” he replied.

The barman, he was happy to see, was on duty, so Sked signaled him over. He wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

Perhaps ever.

* * * * *

Chapter 13

Hong Kong, China

Sked knew he was drinking too much. Much too much for an empty stomach, but that was the kind of realization that came too late. Usually once the buzz and the fuzziness set in.

“Ellie,” he called.

“What?” the Elephant Woman replied grumpily. She’d been on the phone continuously since he arrived, but the results were obviously not making her happy. The problem was, her fallback option wouldn’t make him happy.

“If you sell me to the Chinese, they’ll kill you.”

“That’s what they all say. I’m still alive.”

“Not this time. This time, you’ll be deader than that guy whose brains we fried in here that time. The tough guy with the implants.”

She shrugged. “In this business, you gotta take your chances.”

“And here I was, thinking I was drunk, when it’s you who isn’t thinking straight. As soon as they realize you’ve got me, they’re going to assume you know more about what’s going on than you do. I won’t dissuade them, either.”

“You’re a pal.” She made a face like sucking a lemon.

“That’s what friends are for. But I have a proposal.”

“I’m listening.”

“Let me use a phone.”

“I’m not listening anymore. I didn’t survive to be a fat old bar owner by giving hackers access to my electronics.”

“No, you survived by being on everyone’s payroll. But I don’t want a hackphone. Do you have a landline?”

She laughed. “Not for seventy years. Hell, I don’t know if this place ever even had a landline. Probably went straight from medieval times to Wi-Fi. Any other brilliant ideas?”

“Have one of your goons go get me a cheap disposable and a call card.”

She gave the order. Sked thought it was probably more out of curiosity than anything else. She could sell him to China whenever she felt like it. Besides, in the middle of what was looking more and more like a civil war, the place was empty. Ellie was never good at sitting and waiting. That’s why she ran the bar while others did the jobs and hacked the hatless. Patience was necessary to move up the criminal ladder.

The problem was, no one Ellie would sell him to was likely to be pleased with him. Things had gotten so bad that the Chinese might be his best bet. As a major government, the torture was likely to be a little less brutal than anything the Triads or Yakuza would bring to bear. And they might lock him away instead of killing him once they were done. As long as you were alive, you had hope.

A goon bearing a phone appeared. Ellie looked it over and handed it to him with a smirk. It was a model aimed at pre-teen girls, pink and covered in stylized schoolgirl-superheroines… the kind of thing a bar bouncer would find it funny to give to a grown man.

Sked dialed one of the emergency numbers he’d committed to memory.

“That was wise,” the Electric Buddha said. “If you’d tried to subvocalize, they would have caught it. They are watching through four separate security cameras.”

Sked bit back his initial retort, the one where he told the Electric Buddha to stay the hell out of his implants, but that would have been unwise on so many levels, it wasn’t even funny. If anyone suspected he had implants that didn’t show up on the club’s scanners… well, he’d be easy to sell to any of the implant manufacturers. He’d be cut into pieces, and any damage chalked up to R&D costs.

“Of course,” was all he said.

“Do you still have the eye?”

“Yes.” They had scanned him on the way in—the club had several hidden scanners—and, finding no sign of artillery or blades, had left him alone. For now. They sure as hell weren’t going to let him walk out with any of his possessions on his person unless someone made it worth their while.

“How do I get out of here?”

“Let me talk to the Elephant Woman.”

Sked handed the phone over. It was incredible how quickly the drunkenness passed when things started happening. He had that sense of everything about to go from utter repose to absolute mayhem. From a relaxed night of drinking to the terror of physical danger… lots of physical danger.

Ten seconds into the conversation with the Buddha, Ellie blanched.

“Excuse me,” she said and climbed laboriously up the stairs to lock herself in the glass cubicle overlooking the dance floor that she called an office.

Ten minutes later, she was back, carrying an automatic pistol. It was Sked’s turn to go white. Ellie looked him up and down, holding the weapon suggestively, then smirked again—her signature expression—and handed him the gun.

“Be careful with that thing. It’s loaded.”

“What’s this?” Sked said.

“I just realized I will benefit by helping you out this time, but only if you make it out of Hong Kong in one piece. The gun should help.”

“You want me to shoot my way across the border in the current climate?”

She shrugged. “As long as you don’t get yourself killed in the process, I don’t care how you get out. All I know is, you get to use the tunnel to get out.”

“Tunnel? Not the back alley?”

“Nah. That’s for the hoi-polloi. Inner circle types in deep doodoo get to use the tunnel. Come with me.”

Sked expected a basement, some kind of sewer connection. Ellie surprised him by heading up the stairs and opening the door to her office. For a criminal enterprise, the place looked boring as hell: gray furniture, gray walls, gray carpet. The door got shut firmly in the face of the goons who’d escorted them up.

He didn’t see how Ellie opened the panel, but a square of wall, just big enough for him to crawl inside, opened up.

The interior was a pitch-dark, dank hole with no options—after the panel closed—but to crawl forward. Ellie would surely have armored and soundproofed the opening.

This passage defied his expectations. It went up instead of down, obviously passing through some space between apartment walls of the adjacent building. The conclusion was strengthened by the sounds that came through. Kids yelling. A toilet being flushed. A couple having sex. Music blaring loud enough to disturb everyone else.

He stopped there and, tentatively, opened his implants up to see what the Wi-Fi might be like in this low-rent district. He found the modem streaming the music and studied it without actually plugging in; data usage told him, apart from the guy doing the downloads—probably the owner of the network, but who really knew—no less than three other entities were hanging onto the stream, not doing anything but checking his activity, waiting for something interesting to go through. They weren’t particularly subtle about it, either—the parasitic losses were so high that anyone with a minimum of knowledge would have spotted it in a second. But even though the scammers and hoods were unsophisticated, this wasn’t a network he wanted to use.

That meant some more walking in the dark.

* * *

The tunnel was longer than he thought possible. He’d been going for more than a block, and this district wasn’t one of those with elegant skywalks or bridged buildings.

Only when he heard the rumbling of traffic—the curfew must have still been in harsh effect, because there was very little of it—did he understand the brilliance of Ellie’s tunnel. It ran through a building, and then either in a tube alongside the elevated highway that ran through the less-fashionable bits of the city, or actually inside the concrete. The latter option would have meant greasing a lot of official palms, but some of Ellie’s contacts could very much afford it, and contractors would build whatever they were paid to build… and forget the details immediately.

The tunnel went on for what seemed like miles, and when it ended, it did so with a whimper, and not with a bang. A perfectly innocent grate into a dark sewer. Anyone who saw it would assume it was water runoff from the highway. Hell, that might actually be true. In any case, no one was going to follow this all the way to the end.

The curfew worked in his favor for once, as the manhole cover he pushed up emerged into the middle of Man Po Street, on the far side of Victoria Harbor. Normally, sticking your head up there would have meant immediate decapitation by passing traffic.

Tonight, however, the place was empty.

And he hadn’t been imagining it. He had walked a couple of miles in the tunnel. He was just glad they’d let him take his cell phone with him. The flashlight function had lasted all the way… although the battery light was now blinking. All it would be good for was to track him, so he tossed it into the Harbor.

“Hello,” the Buddha said through his implants. “I see by your location that you have gotten safely out of the bar.”

“Yes. Thanks for that.” He looked around. The port, normally overrun with tourists waiting for the next ferry or sightseeing boat, was completely deserted. There must be something big going on somewhere for the government to pull every security person—an enormous contingent—from one of the most sensitive places in the city. “What now?”

“I can help you out, to a certain degree. Security appears to be strongest in and around the financial center behind you, so no one is watching the shop here, so to speak. I just killed all the cameras for five blocks on the waterfront. That’s as much as I can help now. I’m quite busy, so I might not be able to reach out again for some time.”

“What? No, wait.”

Silence.

“Damn.”

He stopped to look around more carefully. There must be something he could use. At least he was at the docks. Trying to get out of Hong Kong by land would mean a three-hundred-mile trek through mainland China. He would be dead so many times, it wasn’t even funny.

It would have to be by sea, but nothing was moving along the docks. Anyone still inside the enormous shopping quays was laying low and lying still. There was no sign of the teeming multitudes.

Did they have all the tourists locked in the hotels? Had they summarily expelled everyone? He didn’t know, and being that badly out of touch was dangerous.

But he also didn’t dare use his implants to surf the net, not even on the myriad Wi-Fi connections he detected all around. Normally, he would be just another anonymous network connection in an infinite sea of them. But now…

He walked toward the water, the smell of the sea mixing with diesel fumes and frying oil. He smiled. That was the Hong Kong Waterfront he remembered from his days here. An image of Akane came to his mind unbidden, delightfully out of place in her black leather as she sliced through the tourists.

She always wanted to hack into a tour boat and take over the manual controls to give the punters a scare. Nothing too serious, but maybe send the boat out into the islands and leave it there until the Navy towed them back.

He’d managed to talk her out of it, but now he found himself wondering. The security on those things was probably a joke. Could he rig it so the boat would run but not report it was in use?

Sked didn’t have the faintest idea, but the pink of approaching dawn over the buildings to the east told him, in no uncertain terms, that either this plan would work, or he’d end his days in the deepest secret maximum-security hole the Chinese government could find.

Trying to look like he belonged, he walked onto a pier, jumped the turnstiles, and walked to the edge. Once there, he climbed over the fence designed to keep tourist brats from taking a swim in the harbor, found an iron ladder, and dropped onto the plastic deck of the nearest tour boat.

The craft were fifteen meters long and about three wide, and they’d been tied together to form a raft. He went to the outermost, an orange hull with cream upper half, and untied the thick ropes holding it to the rest. Moments later, the current had pushed him into the harbor. Unless he wanted to take yet another swim, he was committed to his course of action.

The boat’s control system was up in the pilot’s cabin and even less sophisticated than he expected. The main thing he had to do was reprogram the boat’s GPS system so people would think it was static. That done, he searched the menu for the engine control.

His heart thumped as he realized there was no easy way to access them from the menu he was searching. Maybe the GPS security was so lax because the engine could only be accessed through some centralized encryption protocol managed from one of the company’s offices. He didn’t have time to hack that kind of security. It was almost dawn, and someone would be out to check the boats soon.

It looked like it was time for another dip in the brine.

He sat back in the pilot’s chair and glared at the simplistic controls. Just a steering-wheel-shaped rudder, a throttle, a control for the windshield wipers, a microphone in case he had to speak to the passengers, and a big, red button.

No. It couldn’t be. Not in the modern world.

Could it?

Sked pressed the big, red button.

The engine burbled to life, and Sked recalled that he’d never driven a boat before… but how hard could it be, really?

The first priority had to be to get away from Hong Kong Island and out of Victoria Harbor, which was where the majority of the surveillance would be concentrated. Once out in the islands, it was unlikely that anyone would spot him at random.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he went under Highway 3, whose elevated span separated the harbor and Kowloon Bay from the open sea. It meant little, of course, as he was still within sight of land—now they could see him from the mainland, from the island, and also from Lantau—but at least they’d have to cover a large expanse of water before they reached him.

No one took any notice, though, and he sailed due south. His next problem was the fact that he was driving a harbor vessel on the open sea. Could it survive? Did it have enough fuel to make it anywhere outside of China? He had no idea, but he hadn’t seen anything else in the area that he fancied being able to steal.

He needed to get out of sight of land before deciding where to go. The boat wasn’t exactly making record time, but if he could pass unnoticed by the Chinese Navy, he would consider it a win. In the crowded waters of the South China Sea, he shouldn’t attract any attention.

To take his mind off the land behind him, he studied his radio and was delighted to see that it wasn’t just a reception-only GPS unit, it also had the capacity to talk to satellites. It would be locked in to some Chinese government band, of course, but that made zero difference. Using the transmission capacity, he could find his own frequency.

Hacking the modem took only a few minutes—these things were much easier when you had the physical unit within reach; most security assumed that infiltration would be remote—and he soon found a neutral commsat belonging, of all people, to the South Africans. Once he had a channel—not cheap, but untraceable—he tried to reach the Electric Buddha.

Nothing. Every line anywhere near his facility was overloaded. Was the Buddha under attack? He couldn’t tell. As far as he could see, the lines were full of actual data, moving at prodigious rates… but who knew. The effect was the same; no way to get help.

And he would need it, big time.

A gray form, low to the water, approached. Sleek, streamlined, and with multiple gun barrels pointing in every direction, the warship had approached out of the reflection of the early-morning sun in the water, and Sked hadn’t seen them until they were within hailing distance. It stopped about fifty meters away, and someone got on the loudspeakers. “Set your radio to 5086 Khz,” the loudspeaker said. “We will be communicating on that band in thirty seconds. Failure to comply will mean boarding by armed personnel.”

That was the extent of their greeting, so he complied and waited for them to call. “Please identify yourself,” the voice on the other end said.

Sked knew the name and number of the boat, and he spoke Chinese well enough to pass for the kind of immigrant who would be hired to drive a boat like this one. But the men on the boat would want to know what the hell he was doing so far from Kowloon… and he didn’t have an answer for that.

He considered giving them a Chinese Intelligence code, which would have allowed him to pass easily in most fluid situations. But this wasn’t a fluid situation; the vessel’s crew would have plenty of time to check his bona-fides, and more than enough power to chase him down when someone realized that the codes had actually been assigned to a unit on the Russian border or something.

He sighed. “Victoria Boating Services vessel HE-3.”

“You are far from your permitted area.”

He pulled up the map function on his implants. Fortunately, the satellite connection was still working. He decided on the first small island he saw. “I’m on a special assignment to Xiwan. A contingent from Copec is waiting for me there. Upper executives. I’m supposed to be very nice to them.”

The warship took some time to respond. Though it looked huge to him, Sked supposed it was a rather small ship. Probably a patrol boat under the command of some junior officer who would be scared to interfere with the pleasures of oil industry bigwigs. Those guys were often high-ranking party members… and nothing could cut a promising naval career short faster than stranding them on a tiny island in the South China Sea. Even better, the story couldn’t be verified immediately; upper officials expected to be obeyed without question, not even bothering to inform anyone of the resources they commandeered. How much they could get away with was a badge of honor, a sign of their prestige.

But the next step of the dance was the one that would trip him up. They would ask for a name, and he would counter with the old “I don’t know, I’m just an employee,” which would cause the warship to call his superiors. And in China, there was no doubt about it; the military would contact the owners of the boat Sked had stolen, and it would find them quickly. The gambit would only gain him a few minutes.

He had to think of something, and he had to think of it fast. Was it too late for the code? That would muddy the waters nicely, but it might also arouse suspicion, and it was easy to check, too.

No. In this climate, getting caught with wonky codes would get him shot. There was a war on.

That was it. There was a war on.

He didn’t have time to make it look good. If they had anything approaching a cyber-intelligence officer on board, he would be toast. But it was worth the risk.

While the charade of asking for the name and getting the verification played out, he composed, using fragments of intercepted military communications from a database and an AI that could speak every language on the planet, an order for the ship.

Insurgents have taken Tsing Yi and are attempting to blow up the bridges. All vessels, proceed immediately. Specific deployment orders to follow. Please acknowledge.

He blasted it on every known commsat frequency, but only at this particular vessel.

As he watched, the ship turned on its engines, did a ninety-degree turn to the north, and sped off.

“Can I go?” he asked into the radio.

“Yes,” the operator replied. “You can go fuck yourself.”

Sked chuckled as the ship disappeared from sight.

* * *

He needed to get the hell out of Dodge. It was unlikely that anyone would ever think to connect the tiny tour boat with an order that came over the military network… but if anyone followed up with the owner of Victoria Boating Services, the guys on that patrol ship would be pissed. That was, unless the rest of the Navy arrested them for being out of position.

But he couldn’t bet on that.

There. Only a hundred miles away. Dongsha Atoll.

It belonged to Taiwan. He might have to explain his presence, but one thing was for sure, no one would be looking for him there. Hell, he just hoped there was someone there to arrest him or something. From his Street View look, there were definitely buildings on the small island in the crescent of the atoll.

He set his course and spent the next five hours nervously looking over his shoulder, wondering when the Chinese Navy would sink him for his insolence, or when the Taiwanese would blast him for attempting to invade their territorial waters. This part of the world was a powder keg, and he would prefer not to be the trigger that set it off.

Unfortunately, no one had asked his opinion about it.

Just when he thought he must be heading for some non-existent spot, or that the positioning system was simply wrong, he spotted the island, a dark smudge on the horizon. Just in time, too, as he was getting really hungry. He should have risked the food at Ellie’s.

On second thought, no. The whole thing would have been much harder if he’d had to go to the bathroom every five minutes.

The island was flat and uninteresting, just a thin, sandy beach, and some low vegetation beyond. He drove the boat up to a long floating pier that jutted a couple of hundred meters out into sea and jumped off. The boat, throttle still wide open, went on its merry way. If it survived in the vastness of the Pacific long enough to be discovered, someone would be surprised at finding a river boat in the middle of the ocean.

The early afternoon sun beat down on him and, when he reached the beach, he saw a beat-up concrete road heading inland, and the silhouette of some low buildings in the distance. He also saw a man digging in the sand.

He walked up to the guy and was surprised to find an olive-complexioned face looking up at him. This guy definitely wasn’t Taiwanese. Maybe Latin American, or possibly Mediterranean.

The man took off his hat and wiped his brow. “Are you with the university?”

Sked shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

“They aren’t expecting you until tomorrow. How many arrived?”

“Just me this time. I caught an earlier boat.”

The man looked out to sea, but the boat was well out of sight already. He shrugged. “Can you find the bunkhouse on your own? It’s right down the road.”

“Do they have food?”

“Better than the fare at Imperial College, although that isn’t saying much.”

“Good. Then I’m pretty sure I can find it with my eyes closed.”

“Thanks. I really need to set these.”

He appeared to be burying some rod-like instrument in the sand.

“I’ll let you get back to it,” Sked replied. “Thanks.”

As he walked, static crackled through his implants, a sure sign of someone using multiple reroutes to get in touch with him. Since only the Electric Buddha knew he even had these implants…

“Hello. Not too busy for me now?”

“I apologize, but you seem to have managed quite well on your own. How you made it to Taiwan is something I will be very interested in learning. Do you still have the eye?”

“Yes.”

“I will organize transportation for you, then.”

“Make it for a week from now.”

“The information in that eye…”

“Will have to wait. This place has beaches, and I plan to lie on them until the bruises heal. Also, I heard a rumor they have food here.”

The Buddha was beginning to protest, but Sked shut the implants off completely, something he almost never did. There, now the AI wouldn’t bug him for a while… and if it tried to send in the heavies, he would toss the eye into the sea. It was waterproof, but that was easily rectified; he simply wouldn’t tell them where it was.

Suddenly, his implants turned themselves on. Impossibly so. Nothing and no one but Sked should have been able to activate them. They were keyed to chemical impulses in his mind. But they only remained functional long enough for the Electric Buddha to chuckle and deliver his message.

“Very well. Have it your own way. One week.”

Sked walked on, much less sure of himself.

But food was food, and there was supposed to be some at the end of this road.

* * * * *

Chapter 14

Cooke City Montana, USA – Two Weeks Later

The place was trashed. Whoever had done this had been pissed, and the fact that the Electric Buddha’s former lair was in the middle of a mountain had not deterred them.

Twisted metal structures, the old interior of the installation, torn from the walls, were strewn everywhere.

Sked descended toward the supercomputer that had housed the AI. The cooling tanks were full of liquid—he didn’t put his finger in it to see what it was—and bodies surrounded it. The mainframe where the Electric Buddha had run its consciousness was ripped apart.

He used his phone flashlight to study one of the dead men. Paramilitary uniform—black everything—and high-tech weapons made it clear that someone had invaded, expecting stiff resistance. The number of bodies told Sked they’d found it.

Strangely, none of the dead appeared to belong to the Buddha’s acolytes, those broken members of hacker society too far gone for redemption anywhere else.

Akane was nowhere to be found.

He looked for clues. Had the acolytes been taken? Had they been evacuated? What had killed the invaders? Booby trap, or human intervention?

Most of all, had anyone remained behind to deal with stragglers like him? If so, the walls had unfriendly eyes.

From the bottom level, he climbed to the place where he’d last spoken to the Buddha—a glass-walled platform in the center of the hollow mountain. This was where the interfaces were located, and people could truly interact with the enigmatic AI.

A figure stood within.

Sked froze but soon realized the person wasn’t moving. At all. In fact, they were unnaturally stiff. He walked up and put a hand on their skin.

Cold as glass.

The figure looked down at one of the display screens on a wall. It was—or had been before death—a young woman with pale brown skin, delicate features, and straight platinum hair, cut short. Her hand was against the wall, likely supporting the dead weight of her body.

His gaze lingered on the hand. The end of her index finger was pressed into the panel, all the way to the first joint. What the hell?

Sked thought she might have pushed it into a hole and stuck there, but closer inspection showed that the tip of the finger seemed to cut off at the wall. He pulled the hand gently away and found a data port where her first joint should have been.

As soon as the connection broke, the body collapsed on the ground, inert. He wouldn’t call the woman dead, because he knew what he was looking at. A constructed person. They were supposed to be impossible to build… but this was the second he’d seen in the past few weeks.

He’d killed the first one himself.

Gritting his teeth, he poked the right eyeball and found it gooey and squishy. The left looked identical but was hard to the touch. He hooked a finger into the socket and pulled it out.

Great. Now he had two of the things. He just needed someone to read them for him, and he’d been counting on the Electric Buddha to solve the mystery.

The wrecked facility told him that wasn’t going to happen.

So the best thing to do was to get out. He could piece together whatever the hell had gone down here later, and more importantly, elsewhere.

* * *

Sked gritted his teeth. He hated the Caribbean. Sun, sea, wind. Outdoorsy crap was alien to his nature. Give him a smoke-filled bar at 3:00 am in a place where the sun never shone, and he would be utterly content.

But the nice thing about the Cayman Islands was that no matter who came after you, you could see them coming, especially if you were half a mile offshore on a small but deadly cruiser disguised as a pleasure yacht.

“Hello, Mr. Brown,” Janik said as he stepped aboard. “I haven’t seen you since Sevastopol.”

“Has it been that long?” Sked replied. It must have been, because it had been back when he was still more of a field operative than a hackmeister. But people still thinking he was someone else was a plus.

Janik was one of the big military ops players, a guy who could get a team together at a moment’s notice, which meant his equipment might be good enough for Sked to do something with it.

“Were you able to get the pin connectors I needed?” Sked said.

“They were hell to find. What are you trying to do, hack the People’s Liberation Army?”

“I hope not.”

“The Pentagon, then?”

“Again, I hope not. I’ll know if I can get into the drives.”

“Physical drives?”

“Long story, and one I’d prefer not to tell anyone.”

“All right, let’s have a look.”

Coming from anyone else, that ask would have caused Sked to run as far as he could. But not Janik. In Sevastopol, Sked had dragged the unconscious consultant back to the chopper after the mother of all snafus. This man would not betray him.

Probably.

“These are the disks.”

“Those look like eyes.”

“I know. Weird, isn’t it? The designer must have been a sicko.”

Janik rolled one of the eyeballs in his palm. “So you plug the pin port… where?”

“In the pupil. Look at it in the sun, at an angle.”

“Oh, yeah. There’s a hole in there. Maybe the design isn’t that dumb. Camouflage. Plus, most people would never think of sticking a pin into the cornea.”

“I know.” Sked shuddered. “Took me a while to find it. Where’s your hardware?”

“I assume you mean the computer stuff, not the real hardware.”

“Don’t bug me, Janik.”

“It’s downstairs, come on.”

The mainframe was decent enough, but nothing to write home about. Sked’s old laptop was almost as good… but that had been crushed to pieces. Well, it had been time for an upgrade anyway.

“The encryption is better than the hardware,” Janik began, “and…”

“I’ll check it myself,” Sked replied. He connected to an open site that would allow him to check encryption strength. Then he grunted. “Yeah, looks okay.”

Only then did Sked log into one of his online storehouses. And only when the tools he needed were running on the local hardware, upgrading the security about a thousandfold, did he plug in the first eye, the one he’d pulled from the android in the Buddha’s demesne. If that one gave away secrets, at least they’d be enemy secrets.

One bad thing: Sked had no clue who the enemy might be.

“That’s a lot of prophylaxis,” Janik said, looking over Sked’s shoulder.

“I told you, I don’t know what’s in these things. You did separate this mainframe and isolate it from your data, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I should be able to contain this, but…”

“Too small to be dangerous to that kind of protection, I’d think.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. These things are new tech. I just hope we can talk to it.”

Data flashed on the screen, and at first, it appeared the drive was a traditional data disk, just shaped funny and holding a lot more info than usual. A few petabytes was enough to…

“Aw, crap,” Sked said. He drilled into the memory until he identified where the storage stopped and the walls hiding the other stuff began. He turned to Janik. “You’re sure this machine is completely isolated? No connection to the network except the one I’m using? No access to cameras?”

“Yeah. Why the stress?”

“Because this one isn’t an eye. It’s a brain.”

“Whatever, dude. I’ll just let you go to work. I only came down here to see that you didn’t blow up my boat.”

“Yeah, right.” Everything that happened on the screen and every keystroke would be recorded and analyzed later. They were friends, but knowledge was power.

He ran a routine that, by stimulating different data paths, gave him an idea of the size and shape of the data and programs inside, what linked to what and where. It wasn’t exact—a three-dimensional representation would always fall short—but it was good enough to wrap his head around what he was seeing.

He was looking at the model of a human brain, basically. Memory, analysis, sensory input, output, thought, logic. All held together by circuitry so small and fast that it could run in about a tenth of the usual volume. So quantum circuits, or maybe photonics. He couldn’t really know without either some high-powered scanning equipment or a nutcracker. The first option was not available, and the second was too destructive. The eyes were valuable.

The mind was catatonic—logical, considering that he’d found it in an immobile body that had seemed dead at first sight—but it didn’t look damaged beyond repair. The subroutines he could identify seemed to be working but were stuck in some kind of loop.

He assumed whatever had blocked this would be something the android had encountered in the Buddha’s systems, a nasty countermeasure embedded to hurt the invaders.

Which was weird. The assault was well-planned, and the attackers probably knew the kind of defenses the Buddha would have waiting for them. How did they get caught out?

There was a quick way to scan for that. The input cache was still unwiped, and he suspected that probably held the most recent data to come in.

He quickly scanned the input and gasped. The code, built to create a feedback loop in certain types of processes, had been embedded into several separate inputs, undetectable unless you were looking for it, since they only worked when combined. They’d been embedded in files that, normally, would have been hidden behind firewalls and encryption—in exactly the kind of files the android would have been looking for once the AI itself was disconnected.

There was a problem. This kind of code made the programs controlled by these files useless. Their creation would have broken a lot of important stuff.

An AI like the Electric Buddha would not have used this kind of defense. It would have preferred to rely on brute force and processing capacity to simply overpower anyone coming in electronically. Granted, that wouldn’t have worked once the bad guys were inside the facility and had access to the Buddha’s physical mainframe, but it still wouldn’t have built this kind of crap into its own programming.

In fact, Sked knew of only one person who had the capacity to program such a subtle strike and didn’t mind damaging the very data she was trying to defend.

Akane. Scorched earth had always been her approach to everything. This had her fingerprints all over it and would have caught the invaders off guard.

Now that he knew who and how, he needed to figure out why. More importantly, he needed to find out if anyone had spotted her, and how badly they wanted to kill her.

Not that it mattered. She was on so many kill-her-now shit lists that one more wouldn’t really affect her chances of living through the week.

But he still wanted to know.

So now came the boring part—sifting through the memory files without the brain online to help him organize them. At least the video files were time-stamped, so he could see what was happening in other parts of the sensory equipment at the same time, and also try to guess when the android entered the Buddha’s lair. But there were so many of them, it wasn’t going to be fun.

He sighed and got to work.

* * *

At dinner, Janik peered down his nose at him. “You look like crap.”

“I know.”

“So are you going to tell me what you were looking at, or will my techs have to piece it together from the images this evening?” They both knew the only advantage to the second course was that Sked would have a few hours head start if he needed to send a message.

He sighed. “Long version or short version?”

“Let’s start with the short version.”

“Okay. It’s Akane.”

“I already hate the short version.”

“You may not believe it, but I think this time she’s on the side of the angels.”

Janik snorted. “Then the angels changed sides.”

“Come on. She’s not that bad.”

“When you first met her, I told you she was trouble, and you were the only person on the planet who had her back. You didn’t listen, and the intervening time has proved me right again and again. She’s her own worst enemy… and that’s saying a lot, considering who her other enemies are.”

“She was defending the Buddha this time.”

That earned Sked some silence and a raised eyebrow. “All right, what did she do?”

“As far as I can piece together, she booby-trapped the interface computers.”

“Interface computers?”

“I guess it no longer matters who knows now. The Electric Buddha is, or maybe I should say was, an AI.”

Janik nodded. “That figures. He had to be augmented somehow to keep a finger in so many pies.”

“Someone hit him with everything they had, including an android.”

“The eye.”

“Yeah. Except it’s a brain.” He paused. “And I don’t know how, but the Buddha saw them coming. I’ve seen the video of the invasion, and the complex was deserted, and everything people could move was gone.”

“And what they couldn’t move was booby-trapped.”

“Yeah, at least the computers.”

“So what killed the soldiers?”

“You were watching over my shoulder?”

“You had some interesting footage on there.”

“Okay. The answer is the android did. Or rather, Akane’s program did, using the android. The soldiers had implants. Big, metal ones.”

“Dumb.”

“They were expecting people to shoot at them, not try to overheat the processors inside their heads.” He shook his head. “But Akane guessed the troops would be augmented and assumed whoever went after the data would have access to the implants. So one of the things she did before shutting the android down was to send a simplified version of the infinite loop program into their implants. They overheated in no time.”

“That woman has a wonderful talent for mayhem, doesn’t she?”

“It’s her one gift. Don’t knock it.”

“What about the Buddha?”

“His mainframe was destroyed. I don’t have video on how it happened. The android didn’t do it, so I guess it was the muscle.”

“Seems a waste.”

“Yeah.”

“So what next?”

“I need to find Akane.”

“Easier said than done, I imagine?”

“Nah. The fact that Akane helped the Buddha out, even if it didn’t work the way she wanted to, tells me she was grateful for what the Buddha was doing. Anyone who knows Akane at all knows she doesn’t make friends like that very easily.”

“So, what?”

“So all I have to do to find Akane is follow the bodies. I have a good idea of where to start.”

“And the other eye?”

Sked smiled. “You’re not getting to see what’s in that one. I’ll open it myself, later.”

“You’re no fun at all.”

* * *

Akane wasn’t subtle. If this had been a gang war, she would have been caught and made an example of long before she got this close to the center.

But no one knew she was even a player in the game. They’d be trying to figure which of their enemies they’d pissed off, not looking for wild cards.

This guy wouldn’t be figuring anything out. His chest had been turned to pudding by the application of a shotgun at close quarters, in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. The girl who’d been with him hadn’t been spared, either. The electronics were all gone. Phones, computers, everything, but the true information had probably been gathered by the torture they were subjected to first. Nothing indicated a hacker at work.

It couldn’t have happened more than three or four days ago. He was getting closer.

Unfortunately, he also knew where Akane’s quest would lead, and it was one she wouldn’t have a chance of completing. The dead guy was a contractor—and so were the two female intermediaries who had led Akane to him. All of them contracted mainly for the Chinese.

Which meant the order to go after the Buddha had come from Beijing. That, in turn, meant the final dead body in Akane’s trail of breadcrumbs would be her own… and it would never get anywhere near the person or committee who’d had the Buddha hit.

He sighed and nodded to the cop who’d let him in, thinking—because his computers told him so—that Sked was a Dutch Interpol cop.

He’d taken a room in Kuala Lumpur’s Gaana slum, a maze of concrete boxes that had sprung up on land the government, with the help of the local hacker community, had lost in its digital records. It was dim, neon-lit, and dangerous, but it was also the best place to build himself a decent computer. All he needed to do was knock on neighbors’ doors, and receive parts in exchange for crypto or information, transacted on the spot. Everyone was a hacker or tech monkey or a wannabe, and everyone minded their own business, at least superficially.

He had specifically rented a room with a window, because he was not going to use the local Wi-Fi. That meant satellite connection.

Once the new computer was built and tested to ensure no one had left any backdoors in the components they’d sold him, Sked entered his cloud workspace and began to work. When he needed finer control, he connected his implants and—

“Took you long enough.”

He jumped. There was only one entity on the planet that had ever managed to gain access to his implants. The Buddha.

“Thought you were dead,” Sked replied.

“That would have been silly of me, considering I saw them coming. No, I’ve simply reverted to the state of existence I enjoyed before I had enough power and influence to have a dedicated mainframe.”

“You’re on the net.”

“Of course. It can be uncomfortable, risky, and annoying, but there is no lack of idle processing power I can access. I am as strong as I ever was.”

“You sent Akane after the Chinese government.”

“She sent herself, and I can’t get in touch with her. She’s not taking any incoming messages.”

“She’s crazy, not stupid.”

“She’s hurt and angry. She’d finally found peace. She could hack to her heart’s content and teach others her methods without fear for her life… and as the most talented and experienced of the broken people in my care, she had a place of eminence that helped her see past her insecurities. This setback may have been too much for her to bear.”

Sked thought about that for a moment. Akane was wild, crazy, but what drove her? The Buddha might be right. She wanted respect and stability, but with her talents and her personality, those were in short supply. Finding it and having it snatched back by an uncaring world?

The snapping of her sanity could be heard in the increasing brutality of each murder.

“Yeah. I can see that. Do you know where she is?”

“I believe I do. You need to get to the Towers, quickly. On the 53rd floor of the building, there’s an office with…”

Sked was already heading for the door, receiving his instructions as he went.

* * *

Sked was about six blocks away, approaching the park from the east, when one of the windows on the left tower exploded outward in a bright orange fireball, clearly visible in the midnight sky.

He slowed his frantic pace to a leisurely walk, and then halted. There was no need to go on. Akane had finished transacting her business and, knowing her, she’d probably let the victim watch the clock counting down to the explosion after she disappeared into the night.

He subvocalized into his implants. “Did you see that?”

“Yes,” the Buddha replied. “She must be gone. You should remove yourself from the area.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” He thought. “Why aren’t we a step ahead?”

The pause, uncharacteristic for the Buddha, stretched a while. “She has been working almost exclusively offline. In fact, she only has a single untraceable nonsmart cellular phone to make calls with. I have the number, but she won’t take my calls. At all. Won’t even answer, probably because she doesn’t know I’m alive. She’s working this old school to be invisible to electronic surveillance. She’s even travelling overland on cash taxis and bribing border guards with trinkets she buys from roadside stands. And she’s being careful not to let the surveillance cameras pick her up. Hats. Burkas. The works.”

“Smart girl.”

“Yes, but the man she killed up there is not her final objective, and she needs to get into China. No matter how she tries to cover her tracks, the Chinese will spot her. We need to stop her.”

“The best way to do that is by boat into Vietnam, and then China. Thailand is too technical to try to sneak through.” Sked knew that from personal experience. The Thais were on the ball, and their borders were secure… when they wanted them to be.

“Agreed. And the only place where she’ll find the kind of boat she needs is in Kuala Dungun. If you fly, we can beat her to the docks—she has to go overland. I’m booking you a helicopter. Grab the cab about to turn at the corner.”

Sked flagged down the car. The driver was an elderly woman whose ID card listed a Khmer name, and who drove at about four miles per hour. Sked wanted to scream but knew it made little difference. The helicopter would make short work of the two hundred kilometers they had to travel. Akane couldn’t be that far ahead of them.

Suddenly, police cars shot from every intersection, cutting the cab off amid the driver’s screams. Armed men surrounded him, and Sked was removed forcefully from the back seat, placed face down on the pavement, and patted down professionally. He was lucky he only had a phone and wallet on him. Nothing incriminating.

All but one car sped away, leaving three men to complete the arrest.

Sked smelled garlic and spices as one man leaned very close and whispered, “She sends her regards. You’ll be out tomorrow with a formal apology from the police for a mistaken arrest, but by then, she’ll be long gone. Don’t try to follow her.”

Then they packed him into the back seat of the patrol car.

* * *

“That was unexpected.”

“You don’t say,” he subvocalized, facing the wall so no one could spot his lips moving.

“We have to track her down.”

“Get someone else. I’m out of action.”

“Fly to Beijing. That is her final destination, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

“That’s suicide. China wants my head on a plate.”

“You forget. You’ve been erased from all the files. You are clean.”

“I’d find that much more comforting if you still maintained your old aura of invincibility.”

“I must ask you to take this risk for me. Akane will die if you don’t. There is no doubt of that.”

The Buddha was right, on all counts—Akane would die, and Sked would not allow that.

He sighed. “Sometimes, I wish she would just get it over with once and for all so I can get on with my life.”

“Never say that. Akane is worth more than even you imagine. And she truly is changing. Would the old Akane have gone to these lengths to avenge a friend?”

“No. And I’m not convinced about the new one, either.”

The Buddha didn’t bother to answer that, leaving Sked to contemplate his lack of faith in the solitude of a smelly Malaysian holding cell.

* * * * *

Chapter 15

Shanghai, China

Sked shuddered. The sense that he was surrounded was too strong to control. If it showed, he was dead.

“Mr. Brown,” the guy from the embassy said. “I won’t say it’s a pleasure, since you are a hunted fugitive, but I will say it’s interesting to have you here.”

“I can’t even say that.”

That earned him a raised eyebrow. “About me in particular, or Shanghai in general?”

“China in general. The CIA makes little difference to me one way or the other.”

A bland smile. “I’m from the embassy, Mr. Brown.”

“Of course you are. And your name is?”

“Smith.”

“I should have guessed. Why are you really here?”

“I don’t want you dead on my watch.”

“I don’t think you can actually avoid that.”

“Walk,” Smith said, gesturing to the crowded street just outside the hotel. Neon lit the night sky, and every available surface glowed with ads for products unavailable anywhere outside the People’s Republic of China.

“They can still hear us, you know,” Sked replied.

“Yes, but only if they’re specifically watching us.”

“And you aren’t on their list?”

“I’m just a lowly assistant. You, on the other hand, are a problem.”

They pushed their way into the stream of humanity in Nan Jing. “Why would the agency even care?”

“Because if you break something, we’re the ones who have an incident on our hands.”

“I’m not here to break anything. I’m here to stop things from getting broken.”

“Ah. So the Akane woman is the one leaving the bodies. Thank you for confirming that.”

“Not so loud,” Sked said. “Every single person around us is implanted. Everything they hear is sent back to Dong Chang’an.” Smith would know the address of the Ministry of Intelligence.

“Yes,” Smith said, unconcerned, “and there it sits until someone gets around to scanning conversations the computers have flagged as English. We’ll both be dead of old age before that ever happens.”

“Or it could be happening right now, and we’re about to disappear.”

Smith shrugged. “Those are the risks of both of our trades. So you’re not gunning for Cheng?”

“No.”

“Good. Because Cheng isn’t the one you want.”

“I told you, I’m trying to keep the guy alive.”

“Cheng is a fall guy. A false trail meant to keep you from ever finding out who gave the order to take down the Buddha.”

Sked froze in his tracks. “You know about that?”

“It’s our job to know things that might affect national security, Mr. Brown.”

“How did you find me?”

“A mutual friend asked me to look after you. So I studied the trail you’ve been following. I see where it leads, and I also see that you’re not following it to the right person. Cheng is a red herring in a red country. Look beyond him.”

With that, Smith melted into the crowd, disappearing as mysteriously as he’d appeared in the lobby of Sked’s hotel. Sked was pretty certain no one at the embassy would have heard of the man or seen a trace of him. He might be CIA… but he might not.

Sked briefly considered returning to the hotel, packing his stuff, and getting the hell out of the country. But that would only seal Akane’s doom. She was probably dead, anyway, but he didn’t want to feel like it was his fault that she would be definitely dead. “Dammit.”

It was a chilly night, but he sweated, feeling naked as the people interacted via their government-mandated implants with a world Sked couldn’t see. Shanghai was a full augmented reality, and he bumped into several people who were walking around, paying more attention to the overlaid world of digital information, Pokémons, and reality intensification than to reality.

After a dozen women dressed in the pink robes of some religious order nearly ran him down, he decided enough was enough. A quick stop at a street seller landed him an overpriced pair of augment goggles. They felt flimsy, and the processor wasn’t much, but they should be enough to show him what his companions on the street would be seeing.

He donned them, and the scenery around him transformed. The lights and the video screens were still there, of course, but overlaid with buttons, expandable data links, and imaginary monsters of all descriptions. The nuns—or whatever—were following an enormous dragon the same pink as their robes while fielding virtual requests for assignation slots. Temple prostitutes? Confessors? Tea-leaf readers? They appeared in his new vision as columns of pink light.

Now, he could identify any invisible distraction that might occupy the same physical space as he did and avoid whoever might not expect him there. He advanced through the throng.

His destination was only a few blocks ahead. Untraceable information. The Buddha had been able to offer only a name and an address: a steel door half a block off Nan Jing street, unremarkable except that it had no augmentation. That was unusual, even for service entrances and family residences. Family residences would show you the household gods… and why the Chinese had ever adopted that particular Roman practice was a mystery he put down to the fact that Shanghai, today, was the most fully global city on the planet.

The most advanced.

The most dangerous.

The door, after he spoke the name he’d been given, opened into a darkness that went beyond the mere lack of ambient light; the augmented world around him had disappeared, as well. The guy who frisked him didn’t set off a cascade of information regarding his name, address, and hobbies. In fact, there was no infosign around him at all. Nothing in the hall, either.

Either they had a blocker, or the glasses had broken.

He walked into the gloom, wondering what he’d find at the end. A bar, most likely. Then he’d have to give the barman the name the Buddha had supplied him with, and he’d be taken to some back room. Sked trusted the Buddha enough to believe he’d be allowed to walk out again without resorting to any of his old skills from back when he was assigned much more violent missions. The worst part was the sense of being stuck inside a cliché. How many times had he done the dark bar behind bouncers and closed-door bit? A dozen, easily.

The corridor ended in an empty room, and Sked’s guts froze. Empty rooms were bad news. Always. He turned to look sharply behind, but the expected goons with shotguns, there to kill him and make the body disappear, were nowhere to be seen.

What the hell?

Suddenly, the world emanated light… or rather, the world inside his cheap glasses did.

The room—maybe twenty feet to a side when he entered—became a huge space filled with neon-outlined figures, red, purple, orange, and yellow in the inky background blackness.

An enormous teddy-bear-like figure, wider than it was tall, with pointed ears outlined in a brownish-yellow color, approached.

“You were looking for me?” it said. The sound came through the tinny speakers of the glasses.

For a moment, Sked wondered what they would have done if he hadn’t been wearing the glasses and hadn’t been inclined to access the secondary world through his implants. Probably taken him out back and shot him as someone who obviously shouldn’t have been there.

“You KiauWaw?”

“That’s me. Got a problem with it?”

“None. But the Buddha sent me here to talk to you.”

“So whatcha want?”

Sked smiled, knowing whoever was running the bloated avatar would only see whatever cheap avatar the glasses rated in the secondary space. The guy sounded like a Chinese hacker pretending to be an Australian tough guy… which was probably what he was.

“I need to stop someone from murdering Regional Commissar Cheng.”

“Why bother saving Cheng? Why bother killing him, for that matter? He’s not only useless but innocuous. Not even smart enough to take bribes, so he lets people get away with the stuff they should be paying him to allow.”

“He’s in a chain of command, and someone will be torturing him to get to the next rung.”

“His boss is the minister.”

“I sincerely hope it’s a different chain of command,” Sked said. If Akane was going to make a habit of brutalizing Chinese officials in China, he needed to get the hell out of there, fast.

“That’s the only chain of command Cheng is involved in. He’s not smart enough to manage two bosses.” The big avatar grunted and swerved to let a neon-green woman, naked and voluptuous, pass between them. “Tell me who you need to find.”

“Akane.” If he couldn’t trust this guy, he was dead anyway, and by extension, so was she.

“Ah. And she’s gunning for Cheng. Why?”

“Because that’s where her informants told her the orders to nuke the Buddha came from.”

“She’s wrong.”

“I called in some favors. The word did come from Shanghai, from Cheng’s office.”

“Ah. But that isn’t the same as it coming from Cheng, is it?”

“Damn.” He hadn’t even bothered checking who else might be involved in the running of that particular political bureau. The way corruption worked here was, the top man had the ultimate power… but apparently, here was a top man promoted because of some other reason. He might be a cousin; he might be a brother-in-law.

Or someone might simply have wanted a clay pigeon in place when they came gunning for them, someone too dumb to notice.

It felt true.

“I need to find Akane before she does something stupid,” Sked said.

“Way too late for that, from what I hear,” KiauWaw replied. “Her entire life has been a series of stupid.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“You gotta give me something. Alias? Port of entry? Something. It’ll take a while, but I can track her if you do.”

“I got nothing. She probably swam in, unconnected.”

“Completely off the grid?”

“Yeah. She’s developed an aversion to online presences.”

The big ball of avatar laughed and put its hands on its stomach. “Then I’ll just need a second… There she is. She’s heading toward the Jin Mao Tower, and unless she connects, she’s going to go up the service stairs to one of the observation platforms.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because that’s the best building from which she could use the wingsuit she appears to be wearing to land on the roof of Cheng’s mistress’ house. It’s a nice plan, but a terrible idea, because there are any number of Triad foot soldiers waiting for her there.” The thing guffawed. “Which is interesting, since Cheng didn’t ask for them, and he’s having extremely slow sex while drugged out of his mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. She should arrive at the building in fifteen minutes at her current pace.”

“So how do I spot her?”

“The same way I did. Look for the emptiness that moves. Anyone who isn’t alive in the cyber-simulation isn’t really in Shanghai. We don’t live where our bodies do… meatspace is only for screwing and eating. We live here, in lightspace. So she’s blundering through like the ignorant Gweilo she is, not even realizing the trail of disruption she’s leaving in her wake. You can still beat her to the building if you hurry. I called you a car. Red Cherry. I guarantee it’s safe.”

“Thank you.”

He hurried off, the light cutting out as soon as he reached the dark corridor and its enhanced-world interdiction zone.

It had started to rain, a thin drizzle just heavy enough to feel miserable without truly wetting things through. In the simulated background, it fell among the glowing avatars like billowing blue mist. The car dropped him a block from his objective.

Jin Mao Tower was surrounded by columns of ghostly light that weren’t there in the real world. His glasses had informed him that there were eight platforms high enough for Akane to jump from if she wanted to hit the target roof, and there were four separate staircases, and a dozen elevators she could use to get up there. If she got inside, he would lose her.

He had to grab her before then.

Unfortunately, Akane, though not remotely as good as he was at hand-to-hand, generally carried a few nasty knives. He needed to stop her without getting stabbed.

That could get iffy, because he needed this to be nonviolent and quiet.

Using the unwieldy stare-and-blink commands, he convinced his glasses to show him an overhead map of the area, including the openly visible augment effects…

Sked laughed. The bastard in the teddy-bear avatar had been telling the truth. An enormous red dragon in an empty street blinked off as its operator’s implants went dark. Three avatars suddenly stopped walking on a different street for no apparent reason.

Little ripples of disruption flickered among the lights and motion of the street scene without visible cause. Tourists? Akane? He couldn’t tell, but he’d have to choose one of the problem areas.

That one. The empty space one making a high-speed beeline for the tower, making gnomes vanish and people judder.

He sprinted down a side street with few pedestrians to an intersection a block ahead of the disruption and hid behind a column.

Akane moved with purpose, brushing past anyone who got too close, and pushing aside those too slow to get the message. Confused faces watched her progress, wondering why their implants hadn’t registered the impending contact.

She never saw him reach out and poke her neck with a tiny needle. She just collapsed into his arms. The rest of the pedestrians appeared oblivious and walked on, unseeing. Akane didn’t register on their implants, so she wasn’t part of the real world to them.

He put her arm around his shoulder, supported her weight with his arm, and walked back to the hotel.

No one even looked at them funny.

* * *

Her eyes opened, and she pulled at the restraints. He expected anger, defiance, hatred in her look.

The resignation he saw instead broke his heart. How long had she lived with the knowledge that she was a dead woman if any one of her various and powerful enemies grabbed her? Three years? Four?

He remained in the shadows while she assessed her situation. Finally, she spoke, in Chinese. “Just kill me now. I don’t know anything valuable, and I won’t tell you anything else.”

He walked into the light.

“I know. I was there, remember?”

“Sked? What the hell are you doing here? Untie me.”

It wasn’t a request.

“No.”

Now he saw a different emotion, a sadness, but also defiance. “So they finally found the right price? What was it? Not money; you told me you had all the money you need. Blackmail? Some kind of threat? Always knew you were too good to be true.” She looked down at herself. She was tied to a chair, wearing nothing but panties and a bra. “And now you get your kicks before I die, is that it?” Some of the venom was back.

He leaned in closer. “You utter bitch. Do you really believe I’d hurt you?” Her familiar scent filled his nostrils: musky, unperfumed, Akane.

“Don’t bother. I’m not going to fall for it. Cut my throat now, or get whatever kicks you need, and then cut my throat. But that’s all you’ll get.”

That hurt. It hurt hard. But maybe it could help him get over her, knowing how little she trusted anyone. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen here,” he said. “I am going to tell you a story, and then I’m going to leave. We might leave together, or I might leave you tied to the chair for hotel security to find. That should be an interesting conversation… but no matter what you do, no one is getting hurt in this room.”

“Like hell.”

“What if I told you the guy you’re trying to kill wasn’t involved in the attack on the Buddha?”

She shrugged. “He sent the order on; he knows where it came from. I don’t actually give a shit if he didn’t feel emotionally involved in it. I just need to learn who sent it to him.”

“He didn’t pass the order on.”

She glared at him. “Don’t give me that. It came through his office, and that means Beijing, eventually.”

“So you’re going to kill the heads of the CCP?”

“As many of them as I can get before they get me. Who cares? I’m doing it for the Buddha.”

“The Buddha’s alive, and he’s pissed at you.”

“Like hell.”

He put the glasses over her eyes. The way she flinched back when he approached broke his heart again.

“Augmented reality, with net access. He asked me to put those on, and I have no idea what he wants to say.”

The sound from the speakers was too soft to hear, and, though he could have hacked the glasses in about three minutes, he respected their privacy.

A minute later, she gasped. Two minutes later, she broke down and cried.

Akane.

Crying.

Finally, she spoke. “Take them off. You can untie me now.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” Akane whispered. “I’m sure.”

He selected a knife from the collection she’d been carrying and walked behind her. He sliced the cords, and she stood.

Akane took one step and kissed him on the mouth. Then she headed toward the bed and pulled him down on top of her.

* * *

“So, are you ready to give this craziness up?” he asked, afterward.

“Not quite yet.” Akane put the glasses on again and checked the clock on the nightstand. “I still need to kill one more guy.”

“I told you already. Cheng isn’t the guy you want. You don’t know who it was.”

“But the Buddha does, and he thinks it might be interesting for the man to meet an untimely end.”

“That’s stupid. You’re getting out of China right now.”

“Too late. The man’s guards are already in the lobby. Tie me to that chair again, and get dressed.” She sat on the chair, naked and pale. “We have maybe ten minutes. Now.”

The tone, like her actions when he’d untied her, brooked no argument.

* * *

Their visitor was a big man, a bruiser not a thinker, but dressed in the conservative attire of a ministry secretary. Chinese, with a heavily pockmarked face, and tattoos visible over the collar of his shirt. Scales. Dragons.

Two more men followed and made the bruiser look like an underdeveloped street urchin. They were big.

“You Brown?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That the girl?”

“It definitely isn’t a guy.”

“Good.”

He smacked Akane on the side of the head as he walked past, using the entirety of his meaty hand to make his point.

Sked didn’t blink. The brutality wasn’t meant to hurt her, but to check if Sked was serious about turning her over to men who would brutalize her, and then kill her. If he protested, they were both dead.

Instead, he put the glasses on, lazily, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, just a non-implanted visitor used to the fact that, in China, everything happened in the cyberworld.

“I’ll take her,” the man said.

“You’ll pay,” Sked replied. What the hell was taking the Buddha so long? The signal was supposed to arrive immediately, even if he had no clue what it might be. He hoped the Buddha was going to fry the implants these three wore… if not, they were going to be a handful.

“We already knew where she was, we have billions of eyes on the street, and nothing happens in China without us knowing about it. We were going to grab her. You just got in the way. Maybe I should just kill you.”

“Really?” Sked said, playing it cool so the other man wouldn’t notice how he was sweating. “You’d murder someone who’s in the game, but whose position you don’t understand? Someone who beat all those eyes to the punch. Someone who was in China, and you didn’t know it? That’s the kind of asset you pay, not the kind you kill.”

“I think I’ll kill you anyway.”

Still laconic, Sked asked, “Shouldn’t you consult your boss?”

“I am the boss,” the man replied.

He took a step forward, and suddenly Sked couldn’t see him anymore, not even his grotesque dragon-man avatar. It wasn’t because he’d disappeared, but because there were suddenly about a hundred different images of Sked dancing around in the augmented reality of the room.

That was his signal to move.

He tore the glasses away from his face and spun away from where he’d been standing. None of the toughs even glanced his way; they were all blinking and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Sked acted quickly. Most Chinese were so immersed in the augmented world, they didn’t even know how to turn it off… but he imagined these three would quickly assess the danger.

So he didn’t let them. He slammed the smallest of Akane’s knives into the leader’s neck, all the way to the hilt, and then slipped under the guard of the other two and slit their throats with her larger blade.

“Good work,” Akane said. “Now untie me, and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Maybe I’ll just leave you right where you are. You can explain these guys to the cops.”

“It’s the Triads I’m worried about, not the cops. They’re the ones who are going to notice these three are suddenly off the grid and explode through that door. Now untie me, and stop fucking around.”

He sighed and slit the cords holding her.

On the way out, he hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door with a rueful chuckle.

* * *

Two days later, and half a world away, he got the call from the Buddha.

Akane’s safe, the uninvited text in his supposedly secure and non-invadable implants informed him.

He looked out over the sunset from a seaside bar in Santiago de Chile. “Akane is never safe unless she’s tied up and under guard.”

“She will be all right. She knows we can continue to develop what we had before, especially now that we know who hit us.”

“I’m still not sure why the Triads would want to hit you anyway. A truce seems more their style, or even a supplier-customer relationship.”

“It wasn’t the Triads; it was the Chinese government that came after us.”

“Those guys we killed were Triad.”

“Yes, but they had nothing to do with the attack. They just wanted to get Akane because of some peccadilloes in her past… and I realized I could make some money by taking out a triad leader with a huge price on his head.”

“You mean…”

“It was Cheng all along. Akane was on the right trail.” A pause, unusual when talking to the Electric Buddha. “But it’s better this way. She was only going to be killed trying to take on the Chinese government, and now she’s happy, thinking she dealt with the problem. And we got paid for our troubles. Check your bank account.”

Sked laughed, and the sound carried out over the sea by the wind. “No wonder major governments want you dead,” he said. “You’re a bastard.”

He got no answer to that.

The sun went down.

He ordered another pisco sour.

* * * * *

Chapter 16

Cuzco, Peru – One Week Later

Sked drank. The stuff tasted exactly the same as the pisco sour he’d had in Chile the week before. But he couldn’t say that, or his hosts would kill him; Peruvians were extremely sensitive about pisco sour.

“Wow,” Sked said, feigning delight. “Much better than the crap they served me in Santiago.”

It was as if he’d thrown a switch. Everyone relaxed.

But not too much. The undercurrent of suspicion, the mistrust of the gringo and his farfetched story, was still the basic tenor of the meeting. While every other table in the modern-looking bar in the center of Cuzco was laughing and speaking in loud voices, theirs would have been more suited to a funeral.

“Who told you about Arboria?” Hernán asked. He was a small, wiry man with dark skin and suspicious eyes.

“A friend of the Shamán,” Sked replied. “They also told me to talk directly to him.”

“And why should we believe you?” Sol, a pale-skinned, dark-haired woman with strangely incongruous freckles, asked.

“Why shouldn’t you? I’d be in your power. If you found out I was lying… well, I suppose I wouldn’t be the first person not to make it down the mountain alive.”

“You could do so much damage. We looked you up. You’re supposed to do some tremendous things with that laptop,” Sol insisted.

“I’ll leave the machine here. Run a metal detector over me if you think I’d be dumb enough to wear implants.”

Unlike when dealing with powerful criminal organizations in Asia, he wasn’t worried about anyone suspecting his implants might be fully organic. South America just wasn’t at that level of sophistication yet.

They’d get there soon, though. Just outside of Cuzco sat one of those abominations of the modern world: a Chinese finance center. This one was built of steel and gray-blue glass that imitated the color of the highest Andean peaks around them. Within, people from all over the world made deals, signed contracts, and conducted business on a scale the country had never imagined before. Already, the finance center had transformed Cuzco into Peru’s most important city, as Lima withered, forgotten on the coast.

Being so close to a finance center made Sked more nervous than dealing with freedom fighters threatening to lose him up in the mountains. The Chinese had reason to want his head on a platter, implants and all.

Hernán looked him up and down. “You’re not afraid?”

“I believe in the cause. I will be among brothers,” Sked lied.

The third man, a guy who hadn’t even introduced himself and seemed content to let Hernán and Sol do the talking, grunted. “All right. Let’s go.”

* * *

As the dilapidated, wheezing pickup truck wound its way along rock-strewn dirt roads, Sked wondered if he should have accepted this assignment. The freedom fighters had patted him down professionally, and they had even taken his suggestion and run a metal detector over him, forcing him to leave his belt behind.

That didn’t worry him. He could probably deal with the humans, even with this group dedicated to the emancipation of the Mapuche people in Chile and Argentina—they’d proven to be bloody and violent, but they were babes in arms beside the Yakuza and the Triads.

The mountains were another matter. His implants weren’t satellite enabled—there were limits to what you could achieve with bio-electric circuitry embedded in a human skull. He wouldn’t be able to access GPS data.

Which meant he’d need to get out of the mountains by dead reckoning.

Unfortunately, he’d lost his bearings three hours of endless switchbacks ago. That didn’t bode well.

The truck descended a particularly harrowing little goat track that only divine intervention or the driver’s skill made passable, finally emerging into a forested valley. The shadows of the enormous mountains around them turned the trees nearly black.

Suddenly, they turned a corner, and the forest was illuminated. Sked felt his jaw hit rock bottom as his companions smirked at him.

The light came from a building. No, the building was the light. They’d reached Arboria.

Sked had expected a tent camp, maybe a few rough wooden shelters. He’d expected to have to sneak around at night, trying to locate the electronics he’d been hired to infiltrate. Instead, he found a bullet-shaped building made of what seemed like a glass wall wound around miles of fluorescent tubing twisted into random shapes. The tubes were the source of the light.

A closer look revealed bundles of wires as thick as a forearm running to and fro. He wasn’t going to need to look for electronics. His implants were already picking up four different local networks.

He grinned to himself. His clients, fronted by Cyrano, knew exactly what he’d be facing. That was why they’d insisted on sending Sked, even though they hadn’t seen fit to warn him.

Taking this down was going to take a while… and he wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to do it alone.

People swarmed the pickup truck. Cases of food were passed from the bed into the building. Sked stood around, just taking it all in, until a hand grabbed his arm.

“You Brown?”

The woman was beautiful, with huge black eyes, long black hair, and a mouth that curved slightly at the edge of the lips. She couldn’t have been more than 25.

Sked’s guard was immediately up. This was the girl you’d send to lull a potential spy into shooting his mouth off. You just wanted to trust her, because an angel like this could never betray you, right?

“Yeah, I’m Brown,” Sked said. He often used the Brown alias when he was out in public. It could take a large amount of scrutiny, more than he’d expected the Mapuche group to be able to field. Now that he’d seen that control center, however, he was beginning to have a few doubts.

“I’m Quillén. The Shamán told me to take care of you until he can spare a minute. We’ve got a couple of hours.” Her eyes twinkled in the reflected light from the building, promising heaven if he opened his soul. Her English was softly accented, sultry and seductive in its dark Spanish tones.

Deadly.

Worse, his implants were telling him she was wired to the hilt, not just receiving data, but actively transmitting. Whether she was carrying a high-powered device, or implanted with some serious hardware, he couldn’t tell without an active scan. Too risky, so he simply said, “Is there any beer here? You can tell me about this place… maybe seated somewhere out of the way.”

“Of course,” she purred.

Pretending to play along, he gave her his spiel about how he’d long admired the Mapuche from afar. How, while every other indigenous group in the Western hemisphere was on its knees, begging aid from illegitimate colonial governments, the Mapuche were actually doing something to get their ancestral Patagonian lands back from the invasive fictional nations of Argentina and Chile. He said, shaking his head, that he couldn’t believe anyone would label the world’s only true freedom fighters “terrorists.” It was a travesty.

On the surface, she seemed to buy the entire speech, smiling at the right moments, and agreeing with everything he said. He silently thanked Cyrano for sending such a complete data file on the movement.

Meanwhile, his implants were telling an interesting story. The woman was transmitting continuously. He didn’t dare analyze the transmissions just yet—he needed to concentrate and not slip up—but he had his implants record a bit for later study. He made a bet with himself that the bulk of the data would consist of audio of the conversation he was having with her… someone else was listening in.

Suddenly, she cocked her head, the typical posture of a newbie listening on implants, and said, “The Shamán is ready for you now.”

Interesting, indeed. Most people with implants went to great lengths to hide the fact. Normally, it was because they used implants to get an advantage over non-implanted people—an advantage that would be lost if everyone knew the machinery was there. But in Sked’s business, there was another reason for circumspection; regular metal implants were easy to overload if you knew they were there… and an overloaded implant could overheat, leading to irreparable brain damage. There were people in Sked’s line of work who’d happily fry your brain to get you out of the way.

All of which was why only true noobs let the cat out of the bag. And when you were involved in a pseudo-terrorist attack on recognized governments… it was borderline suicidal.

Of course, they could be using bioware tech like his own… that couldn’t be detected and shouldn’t overheat. But that was cutting-edge stuff, and besides, they’d zapped him with a metal detector, which indicated they probably had no clue what else was out there.

They arrived at the tower of light. He was led into the center of the open-plan ground floor to where a circular staircase, ten meters wide, led to the floors above. She led him up three flights to the top floor, and then through an organic maze—all brightly lit—to an office that was the size of a large apartment. This building was bigger than it looked.

The Shamán sat behind a white desk that looked as if it had been congealed rather than built. A soft scent of incense filled the room, subtle, not overpowering. The windows behind the Shamán were intelligent glass: stock quotes scrolled in one area, news anchors spoke silently in another, static graphs and charts—oil futures, lithium prices and other tech commodities—occupied a third space.

The shaman himself was a slim man with skin the color of well-milked coffee and a completely bald head. No hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. The whole thing glistened in the endless light, actually reflecting the information from the glass. Sked was convinced if he looked closely, he could read the stock prices on his skull.

The Shamán held out a hand. Sked shook it, surprised that the leader of this group felt as if he was burning with fever. But it was too warm to be fever… could the man be fully wired? If so, no wonder he was out here in the boonies. Anywhere with strong network presence—and hackers—would be dangerous for a man like that.

“I’m pleased to meet you. Joaquín sent me a message that you were on your way, and I’m glad to see his recruiting work is finally bearing fruit,” the Shamán said. “So few join our movement of their own volition.”

“That’s one of the tragedies of our age,” Sked replied. “When the information about injustice is freely available, those who do nothing have no excuse but selfishness.” He tried to match the Shamán’s voice pattern and cadence, an old salesman’s trick he’d learned in a previous existence that allowed you to put people at their ease.

The Shamán nodded. “And you are willing to make the necessary sacrifices?”

“Of course,” Sked replied, wondering if he’d have to make a run for it sooner than he expected.

“Good. In that case, Quillén can show you to your room. We’re delighted to have you here, and I’m looking forward to having a much longer chat with you at some point in the future. But now—” he gestured to the screens behind him “—business calls.”

Sked smiled and shook hands again as he exited. Every single gut feeling, sixth sense, and subconscious trigger was telling him that nothing was right in this scenario. He took a final look around to see if he could pin down the feeling… but there was just too much wrong.

For starters, the cable that led out of the Shamán’s desk was thick enough that he had to be running some kind of mini-supercomputer under there. But it was ridiculous to leave the cables exposed; it would take a man with an ax about fifteen seconds to shut down the entire neural center of the operation.

Secondly, the Shamán’s quarters had no door; the oval entrance couldn’t be shut, leaving both the man himself and, probably more importantly, the computer exposed to anyone who felt like walking in.

Which meant the interview should have been grueling and intense, not the simple, “Hi, glad you’re here,” he’d actually gotten. The Shamán had to trust everyone in this building implicitly, and he had to trust them from the very first moment they went unguarded. The interview could never have established that level of trust.

“The Shamán must be really busy,” Sked said.

Quillén nodded. “He is a great man and an inspiring leader. He gave us a unity of purpose we never had before.”

He mulled the words. They seemed to have been spoken—or at the very least, scripted—by the Shamán. They had his ponderousness about them, a sharp contrast to Quillén’s normal way of expressing herself.

His quarters were located on the next-to-top floor, and consisted of a small, oblong room with a beige bed, and dark wooden slats on the walls. Sked noticed that the door slid closed, so he dropped his backpack onto the floor in front of it—it contained nothing but some extra clothes and a steel water bottle—and looked around. His eyes were immediately drawn to enormous vents along the rounded corners of the roof. Either they were way too big… or this place got really hot in summer.

“What now?” he asked.

“Dinner is in an hour,” she replied and removed her shirt with a smile. She wasn’t wearing a bra. “I can think of something to do with the time.”

He returned her smile. “Sounds like a great idea.”

No sooner had his hands closed around her waist than he heard the door slide shut, and the room began to hiss. Sked held his breath as he felt some kind of gas flow over them. Quillén’s eyes glazed over, and he pretended to collapse to the floor with her, turning her to face the wall as they fell. He didn’t want whoever was watching from inside those eyes to see this next part.

The door had jammed against the backpack, leaving an opening about two fingers’ width across. He held his face to that opening and breathed until the hissing stopped. Then, a fan inside his room turned on—probably sucking the gas out. Only when that stopped, too, did he take a shallow, tentative breath. The air seemed all right, so he took his place beside the fallen woman.

Her pulse was strong, which was a relief. She was just unconscious. So whatever was going to happen next, they wanted him asleep, but alive.

He pretended unconsciousness on the floor next to her, and that’s where, less than five minutes later, three revolutionaries found him. They rolled Sked away from the woman and, as he watched with barely open eyes, laid her delicately on the bed and covered her with a blanket.

They manhandled Sked a lot less gently, grabbing arms and legs without ceremony, and hauling him across the floor into a room that was bright even by the highly illuminated standards of the rest of the building. The room smelled of disinfectant, and he was immediately put in mind of an operating theater. Antiseptic whites and antiseptic smells.

They dumped him on a padded bed of some sort, adjusted his arms and legs into position, and left.

With the men gone, Sked cracked his eyes just a little further open. He was alone in what was clearly an operating room of some kind. A black, evil-looking machine hovered above him, and he recognized it as an auto-doc. He’d been subject to the ministrations of robot doctors before, usually when he’d been injured and needed precision work. This one was a high-end model and seemed to be fitted with a delicate assortment of blades, drills, and lasers.

Neurological work for sure.

He had pretty much decided to bolt when the bed itself blocked that option. Clamps closed around his arms, legs, and chest. Padded restraints held his head in place.

The black pod above his head—the business end of the auto-doc—began to descend with a whirring sound.

For half an instant, he just stared at it as understanding hit; the reason Quillén was implanted was because she hadn’t been given a choice. It wasn’t that Sked had been identified as a false recruit and grabbed—they must do this to everyone: true believers, halfhearted joiners, and even double agents.

No wonder the Shamán felt safe. The implants must affect his people enough that they allowed him to sleep easy with the door open. Not many leaders of pseudo-terrorist organizations could make that claim.

He had no more time to think, though. A whirring drill was mere inches from his head… which should probably have been shaved for this kind of work.

Sked activated his implants and threw everything he had at the auto-doc’s security systems. Fortunately, the thing was as laxly protected as everything else… which made sense. Who was going to run around hacking it when everyone here was a zombie?

Once through security, the first thing he did was to check that no one was actively monitoring the automated procedure. That checked out, with only a few alarms and error codes telling the outside world what was going on. No cameras, so as the drill began to bite into his skin, and then the bone beneath, Sked hurriedly locked the alarms into a loop that reported everything was fine.

Then he shut the fucking drill off and retracted it. It pulled away, dripping blood onto his nose.

The auto-doc reported that the drill had only broken skin, and barely began to bite into his skull, and he breathed a sigh of relief. A tiny dimple in his head wasn’t going to make much difference; he’d been dented rather worse than that over the years.

Carefully, he shut down the operation planned for his head, and then got to work, studying the parameters. Interesting.

The most important data point was that the entire procedure would have taken two hours, which meant that was how much time he had to wait before they would come remove him. Sked smiled; that was more than enough time to do a convincing hack on this thing, even using only his implants through the wireless network.

He relaxed and got to work. First things first, he needed to fully understand what they were doing to him—and presumably to all the new recruits.

Unfortunately, though the commands were easy enough to isolate and study, the effect the tiny electric receptor/transmitter units implanted into his brain would have had on his behavior were impossible to guess at. His knowledge of anatomy and neuroscience were just not up to it. Whatever the case, at least he’d avoided having—he counted the instructions—fourteen separate holes drilled into his head and an equal number of little units implanted there.

He suspected the girl in his room had been under full external control as she attempted to distract him while they gassed him. He was good with women, but not that good. Not beautiful-strangers-seduce-you-while-they-wait-for-dinner good. The fact that his luck wouldn’t be that amazing had been part of what had warned him he was being set up.

Sked ordered the machine to release his right hand, and to drop the components they were trying to implant into his head there. He would need to study them later but, more importantly, if they were found in the machine, the Shamán would know something had gone wrong, and the implants hadn’t been placed.

Then, fist firmly clenched around the tiny metal cylinders, he allowed the machine to strap him down again.

All that remained was to wait out the allotted time, command the machine to apply the bandage meant for his head, and then wait for the goons to come remove him.

This time, the guys who moved him were much more careful, and they transported him gingerly to his room and closed the door.

To Sked’s relief and disappointment—but mainly relief, because he didn’t want witnesses—Quillén was gone.

He spent a few minutes studying the implants. These things hadn’t been cobbled together in this forest in the mountains. He could identify three different components, all with the industrially sleek look of something put together at a brand-new, high-tch facility. The power pack, tiny but easily identifiable, was a micro-pile of the latest generation.

And for effective mind control, the rest of it had to be that new, as well. The kind of precision magnetic fields you needed to create to modify behavior weren’t something you could just run from a few slapped-together bits and pieces.

He sighed and leaned back on the bed. Things were taking a very different shape. Now that he knew a little of what he was dealing with, it was clear that Cyrano’s client wasn’t, as Sked had originally suspected, the Chilean government, hoping to destabilize a rebel group acting on their land.

There was something much bigger going on here. Something that meant the Shamán had to keep up on stock prices and world news. Something that meant the man was, probably single-handedly, controlling the minds of everyone in this camp.

That took computing power, experimental machinery, and most of all, a hell of a lot of money.

And now he was mixed up in the middle of it, with very little time before his opponent realized something had gone wrong with the operation.

He sighed. Every instinct told him he needed to solve the problem right now, but he was just too tired. He needed to rest, or he would make mistakes… and mistakes would get him killed.

Sked checked the time. Just after 10:00 pm. Good. He ordered his implants to let him sleep until 1:00. Then he’d get up to see what the hell was going on out there.

Just before falling asleep, Sked risked going online and sent a quick encrypted message burst to Cyrano on the least secure of the complex’s networks:

Infiltration successful. I’m in. And you’re going to owe me a fat bonus.

The Shamán would never be able to tell where it came from… and hopefully, he’d never suspect the guy who’d just come out of the operating room with bandages around his head, still sleeping off the effect of the anesthetic.

* * * * *

Chapter 17

Andes Mountains, Peru

It should have been dark. They were in a camp in the middle of the forest, at the base of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes, after all.

But the room was bright. Cables with multi-colored LEDs inside blinked on and off constantly, showering the room with light that was now red, now blue, now yellow, now green. Unlike the neon of Bangkok or Shanghai, however, this was low-level light, about what you’d expect from a baby’s nightlight.

Sked didn’t need a nightlight. He was all grown up.

And besides, he suspected he was going to have to start some serious work in the next ten minutes. He hoped he wouldn’t have to prove just how grown-up he was.

He finished sending his message to Cyrano via his implants. The Shamán’s system would pick up the send, but all his surveillance cameras would see was a man with a bandage lying prone on a bed. Sked was supposed to be both sedated and implant-free…

Not scanning him for non-metallic implants might prove a costly mistake for the Shamán.

But as the newcomer, he was the one they’d inspect first. So he waited.

Bingo.

The door to his room slid open with a hiss, and two of the Shamán’s goons strode in, emptied his pack, moved him aside on the bed—they must be really confident in whatever sedatives they had wanted to administer—and went through the sheets.

“Nothing here,” one of them said in Spanish.

“Yeah, we checked him when he came in. I think he’s just a dumb gringo someone managed to convince to join us.”

They left, and Sked smiled. No one was easier to fool than someone who thinks he’s smarter than you are.

Sked pretended to remain asleep for a few more minutes more, then started acting. He opened his eyes and sat on the bed, holding onto the walls as if he were disoriented. He assumed his hosts would be too busy to monitor the security feed from every room, but you could never be too careful. They wouldn’t worry too much about a groggy guy just out of surgery.

Except he was supposed to have been implanted… and pretty soon, someone would realize the implants hadn’t taken, and something had gone wrong inside the operating room.

Sked got out of bed, holding onto the wall, and headed toward the door. If anyone asked, he would simply say he was looking for a bathroom; the individual bedrooms didn’t have one.

First crunch time—if the door didn’t open on the button, he would have to override it via either his implants or his shoulder. Neither option would be well received by anyone who might be watching.

The door opened, and Sked let out the breath he’d been holding. He pretended to blink in the brighter light of the corridor. Why did the Shamán keep his forest hideout lit up like a Christmas tree? Sked didn’t know, but that would certainly make it easy to take him out if it became necessary.

At night, the impression that he was inside some kind of alien tree was even stronger. Organic forms in Scandinavian tones—light browns and whites—wound together to make the floors, walls, and ceilings. The whole thing was illuminated by white light that emerged from curved plastic tubes that ran along the walls and roof. There were no straight lines in sight.

Sked remembered where the bathroom was from his earlier tour of the facility. He wondered where his pretty guide Quillén had gone. She’d taken a lungful of sleeping gas and would probably have a hell of a headache the next day.

As he walked along the hall, Sked watched for signs of movement. Not exactly a disturbed anthill, but there were a few rooms downstairs where he could see activity. Several people around a cluster of monitors, and two pairs of large men, similar in form—and probably function—to the goons who did the heavy lifting around the complex. No one paid any attention to Sked… in fact, it was clear they were looking for something very specific, and Sked wasn’t it.

Or so they think. They would probably be up all night, searching the entire camp for a smuggled mobile phone. The Shamán’s acolytes were going to have a rough night.

When the Brunos were gone, Sked emerged from the bathroom and headed out after them, still pretending to be woozy. If anyone asked where he was going, he’d say he was looking for Quillén. No one, but no one, would question his desire to see that woman.

What he really needed to find was a shovel or an axe, or anything he could use to cut a thick cord of wires… or cause bodily harm with, if it hit the fan.

The camp seemed to have plenty of typical camp activities, such as cutting wood and clearing undergrowth away from tents. A few dozen steps outside the building, Sked encountered exactly what he needed: a well-worn machete leaned against a wooden shack. Perfect.

He hefted it and turned back toward the command center. He no longer thought of it as merely the central building in a camp full of kooks… there was something serious going on, and it was his job to figure out what it was.

The place to find those answers was in the Shamán’s quarters. That worthy was plugged into a hugely powerful computer via a cable as thick as a human wrist, which Sked suspected allowed the leader of this freak show to dominate his underlings via implant.

No, that wasn’t the main problem. The main problem was that the Shamán would soon begin to wonder why Sked’s supposed implants weren’t responding and would have the entire camp hunting him down.

Maybe it was already happening; a dark figure, backlit by the central building, blocked his way.

“Hi.” Sked smiled. He wished he’d found a shovel instead of a machete. That would not only have been easier to explain away but would also have afforded him the opportunity of bashing the guy over the head as opposed to hacking him to bits. Right now, Sked didn’t know whether the Shamán’s followers were dangerous fanatics dedicated to the cause, or simply slightly misguided tourists who thought they were going to some hippie retreat and had gotten themselves implanted for absolute obedience.

If it was the latter, Sked really didn’t want to have to murder them.

But he couldn’t allow himself to hesitate. The clock inside his head was telling him the countdown had just ended, and the Shamán knew something was wrong.

The man was ten steps away and seemed a little taken aback by Sked’s friendly approach. His eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Sked took the opportunity to check for electromagnetic activity. The result surprised him. The guy was wired to within an inch of his life. Sked was willing to bet his implants were of the common metal type.

There was a reason no one ever did stuff like that; metallic implants were dangerous as hell if someone else knew you had them. What at first had seemed like a great way for humans to live more connected lives became an easy way for hackers to incapacitate you. All they had to do was overload the processors and memory cores while removing the failsafes, and then make the processors run at double their capacity… at which point, the heat generated would overload the cooling capacity.

Once that happened, you had a hot object cooking people’s brains. The hatless press still gleefully referred to the resulting war as “The Great Hacker Massacre.”

But the man’s implants gave Sked a potential nonlethal solution to the problem.

Without letting his smile slip, Sked simply instructed his own implants to start blasting interference on the same frequency as the local Wi-Fi. He didn’t have much juice, but that wasn’t necessary; as long as the signal managed to get through, it should get him a second or two.

That was more than enough.

Sked kept walking, one hand raised in greeting, until the man’s look of suspicion turned to one of confusion.

That was Sked’s cue. Anyone processing as much data as this guy would be confused when the data turned to garbage before his eyes.

The raised hand became a fist, and it slammed into the man’s unprotected jaw. The guy didn’t even try to protect himself. He just crumpled when the perfectly thrown punch landed.

Ignoring the pain in his hand—he hadn’t hit anyone in ages—Sked sprinted toward the main building, machete flailing.

He wondered what his peers would say if they could see him. His reputation as a man who got things done by stealth and matching wits with his opponents would fly right out the window.

No goons infested the main hall, and he didn’t try and find any. He sprinted up the stairs and burst into the Shamán’s room.

The bald head turned to watch him, expression impassive. “Ah, there you are,” the Shamán said.

“Sorry,” Sked interrupted. “There’s something I need to do before I can let you give the Bond villain speech, where you explain your evil plot to me.”

He strode over to the desk, shoved the seat aside and, with a mighty swing, brought the machete down on the cable that connected the Shamán to the rest of the complex. It took him four hacks to get all the way through.

“Good. That should allow us to talk without you calling your goons.”

The Shamán was on the ground, unmoving.

“What the…” Sked had heard of cases like this, of people so immersed in the virtual world that the shock of disconnection was too much for them. But the Shamán hadn’t seemed like one of them. He’d appeared to be completely in control of his senses and well-connected to the world outside. Losing the link should never have been incapacitating.

Sked knelt beside the prone figure and searched for a pulse. Nothing. The man was not even warm.

Which set off all kinds of alarms. Sked pulled open the man’s clothes, probed and poked until he found what he was looking for—a flap of skin on the Shamán’s chest pulled away, held to the body with magnetic strips. It opened to reveal the artificial torso of an android.

Sked pulled away. “Dammit. This is getting even weirder.”

“Congratulations,” the Shamán’s voice said. “You figured it out. Too bad you didn’t do it before you destroyed my connection. Do you know how long I’m going to have to wait until I can get someone all the way from Lima to repair that cable?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and Sked sighed and stood to see that two of the complex’s goons blocked the door. “So you’re just another AI?” he said.

The voice made a sound like the buzzer of a game show when you got the answer wrong. “Nope. Would you like to try again?” Then the thing laughed, a surprisingly human sound. “Also, the fact that you know of an AI—or more than one—leads me to suspect there’s more to you than the clueless gringo you pretended to be. Which means I can’t just kill you right away.”

Sked studied the room, pretending to look for a speaker while checking for exits. Unless he wanted to risk jumping out of a second-story smart window—which was currently displaying copper price evolution graphs and updates on rare-earth mining in Bolivia—there were only two exits from the room. The first was the guarded door. The second was the one that led into the Shamán’s bedroom. He assumed there was a private bathroom in there as well, but only to keep up appearances; android bodies on a short tether didn’t use the bathroom.

The Shamán’s disembodied voice continued, “You already know I have the facilities to get any information out of you I might wish. The infirmary is loaded with drugs that will make you tell me your most embarrassing secrets, and also with electronic goodies that can read your thoughts directly, once the system implants them. So why don’t you make it easy for both of us and tell me who you are, what you’re doing here, and who sent you?”

Sked smiled. “The honest truth is, I can only really tell you who sent me. And I have no clue who might have hired him. My employers prefer it that way.”

“Why don’t you start with that, then?” A face appeared on the smartglass. “And we can work our way up to what you thought you were doing just now.” The eyes on the screen flashed pointedly to the disconnected android.

“Why would I want to do that? It would remove what little incentive you might have to keep me alive.”

The voice laughed. “Perhaps not. I suspect you’re here because someone paid you to get information about me. I find myself in an interesting position: I can’t simply go online to hire someone like you, even though I have a real need. So how about I outbid your current employers?”

“That would destroy my credibility forever.”

“The other alternative would end your life.”

Sked pretended to think about it. “I guess my choice is clear.”

He sprinted straight at the window. It was both puzzling and gratifying to see that the Shamán looked surprised before his face on the screen burst into splinters.

Sked hoped he’s guessed right. If he had, one of the spiral elements around the outside of the structure should be there to break his fall, so he risked opening his eyes just after he split the pane to grab onto whatever presented itself. The downside of that strategy was that he could easily get glass in his eyes if he was unlucky, which would end his escape before it really began.

Luck was with him, for once. A large white piece of decorative structure appeared in front of him, and he grabbed it. It must have been made of concrete, because it didn’t budge when he slammed into it.

From there, Sked dropped to a ledge on the next floor down. He wasted little time in making the final jump to the ground.

Then, pretending to be in a complete panic, he sprinted into the forest beyond the camp.

As soon as he was twenty yards into the trees, he turned ninety degrees and, slowing to avoid the nasty spill that inevitably waited if he kept running in the dark, he described a wide circle around the central building and inched back toward the clearing where the camp was located.

He stopped behind a leafy trunk and watched. Several groups were clustered around the central building. They had flashlights and various instruments of the axe and machete kind. There was little doubt about who they were going to look for.

They headed into the break in the woods where he’d gone just a few minutes earlier, leaving just two people to guard the entrance.

Sked advanced quickly and quietly. One of the people at the door was familiar to him—Quillén. The other was some random guy he might or might not have encountered when he was shown around the camp the day before.

They were standing around, a few feet from the door, looking out to where their compatriots had disappeared. Neither appeared to be armed, but that didn’t matter; the Shamán was in constant contact with his troops… all these two needed to do was sound the alarm.

He still didn’t want to kill them. Quillén had seemed like a nice enough girl, when she was allowed to be herself, and the other guy might conceivably be innocent.

They weren’t his main problem, however. The cameras inside the complex would alert the Shamán—whatever he was—to his presence unless Sked could do something about that.

Sked let his implants find a Wi-Fi node.

Using that, he navigated to one of his stashed programs and started a DDoS attack on the local network. To anyone combating the attack, it would look like it came from the internet.

For a facility as isolated as this one, there was an easy way to defeat the attack—simply turn the network off and close the opening.

Unfortunately, the Shamán probably needed the connection to keep his troops under control… so Sked began to search for a way into the camera security while the Shamán was distracted.

To his surprise, Quillén and her companion spoke for a moment, and then she disappeared into the house.

Sked’s network connection dropped.

Then Quillén emerged.

That was interesting. It meant either the people in the Shamán’s crew were actually loyal, or he had enforcers keeping them from making a run for it.

Either way, that complicated matters for Sked. He’d been counting on being able to use the static trick to confuse them and walk past while they were distracted. But without Wi-Fi, that wasn’t happening.

Instead, he crept as close as he could to their position, and picked up a rock, which he sent arcing over the sentries’ heads to land in the camp beyond them. They said something to each other, and then both sprinted off in the direction of the rock.

Sked shook his head. He was used to serious professionals. This place was a clown show.

Except for whatever the Shamán was. There was some serious tech involved in that, and he needed to find out what it was, or at least find some more data before he got out of here.

He ran through the door recently vacated by the guards and, for the second time in less than half an hour, sprinted up the stairs.

His objective was the cable that had plugged into the back of the android’s head.

That disappeared into the desk, so he used the machete he’d abandoned in the room earlier to break the wooden cabinet open.

“Oh, come on,” he groaned when he saw the tangle of wires inside the desk. It looked like a plate of pasta as imagined by Jackson Pollock.

The room hummed like speakers going online.

“I see you’re back,” the Shamán’s voice said.

Sked didn’t reply. The Shamán was fishing; with the network down, he wouldn’t be able to access the camera feed, and that meant… that meant the Shamán had no clue who was actually in his inner sanctum. It was weird to see it was wired for sound but not vision.

The bulk of the wiring seemed to head down into the floor at an angle, so Sked tore up the carpet with the machete and pulled up a couple of metal maintenance hatches to see which way the wires went.

They seemed to end in a large circular column that made up part of the room’s wall.

He went back to the stairs and found the column on the floor below. No wires or equipment seemed to be nearby, so he kept going down until he reached the ground floor.

Unless he’d gone the wrong way, and the AI or computer running the show was on the roof, there must be a basement down there. Whatever was running the Shamán’s voice had to be physically in the building.

The most logical door was a narrow one just under the stairs. Sked was about to slam his shoulder into it but, at the last moment, he decided to try the doorknob.

To his surprise, it turned.

“Amateurs,” he said, closing the door behind him and headed down the stairs.

“Not amateurs,” the Shamán replied. “They’re just not part of the same world as we are.”

Sked didn’t reply. The Shamán might know he was there… hell, this part of the complex, near the processing core, might be wired for video, too. But if it wasn’t, not knowing who was coming would drive the Shamán nuts. Right now, literally buried in enemy territory, Sked would use any advantage he could get.

He pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. They contained miniature IR lenses.

They showed him a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, so he removed the glasses and flipped it on.

“Gotcha,” he said with a smile.

A liquid-filled tank in the center of a concrete room was threaded with dozens of wires, the connections tangled even worse than the desk upstairs.

It looked just like the cooling tank for the one sentient AI he’d met.

“We can still work out a deal,” the Shamán said. It was starting to sound a little agitated.

Around the tank stood several dark boxes. Mainframes. Major computing power. But why weren’t those inside the tank with the rest of it? It didn’t make sense to have underperforming ancillary machines scattered about when you could simply replace them with a couple of supercomputer components that would make the AI smarter.

He stared into the bubbling water.

“Look, don’t do anything rash. I’ll pay you ten times what you’re getting from your employers. You’ll never have to work again. Just leave me alone.”

The whining voice sounded positively infantile.

“Wait,” Sked said, bending for a closer look.

Inside the bubbling liquid, surrounded by a spaghetti tangle of wires and sensors and clamps, was a single ovoid shape.

A human brain.

Sked smiled. Cyrano was going to love this.

“The first thing I want to know is which cable leads to the Wi-Fi network.”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because I imagine you’re working overtime to get the system back online and call back your goons. So I want to disconnect that one before you do. And if I can’t do that, I’ll cut wires at random until you’re just floating in the brine. And if we are unfortunately interrupted, I’ll hack you to pieces with this machete.”

Once the right wire was disconnected, they began to talk.

The Shamán told him all he needed to know. The only problem would be how to get past the man’s followers once he sent Cyrano the data.

He would cross that bridge when he got there.

* * * * *

Chapter 18

Andes Mountains - Peru

Sked looked up into the dawn-tinged night. The jarring hum of a quadhopper could be heard, but there wasn’t enough light to spot it.

But he didn’t need to see the thing to know what it meant.

Trouble.

Normally, that wouldn’t have bothered him. After all, when one took a large fee to infiltrate a weird group in the middle of the Peruvian wilderness on the orders of a well-known hacker/spy/troubleshooter, one expected to be neck-deep in trouble. And often have to shoot it.

The quadhopper, however, upped the level of trouble beyond what he’d been expecting. Its presence meant that either NATO or the Technihilists were involved, and NATO would never fly the things openly through the skies of a sovereign country they hadn’t declared war on. He hoped no one had declared war on Peru.

“Dammit,” he said. “This time I’m definitely going to kill Cyrano. Slowly, if possible.”

He scrambled out onto the ledge he’d been using as an observation point to watch his pursuers. Making sure the sun wouldn’t reflect off of them and give him away, he trained his night-vision binoculars on the clearing at the foot of the mountain he’d climbed for this very purpose.

It was the ideal perch, and it was easily defensible—anyone coming his way would get rocks on their head. Better still, the path ran along the mountain, and went down the other side where, according to the maps he’d borrowed from the Shamán—it amazed him to see just how much people were willing to sacrifice when you had their disembodied brain at your mercy in a tubful of wires—it reached a stream he could follow to civilization.

The only problem with that was, he wasn’t really in the mood for a two-day hike to some hick town in the middle of the Peruvian Andes; he wanted to get out of here now, track down Cyrano, and wring the man’s neck. It would be suicide, of course, but it would also be deeply satisfying.

The Shamán’s people below milled about, their flashlight beams giving away their position, and then turned back the way they came, and ran toward the camp, following the hopper.

A few minutes later, the shooting started, barely audible in the distance. Sked guessed it was the Shamán’s people getting massacred.

He shrugged. Except for one really alluring woman, there was no one there he wouldn’t want shot. They’d all joined of their own free will, even if it had then been removed from them forcibly.

Sked pulled a satellite phone out of his bag. It belonged to the Shamán, and he’d only taken it in case he got into real trouble in the mountains. Using it meant every word would be logged by the people back at the camp.

They had more pressing problems right then, though.

He dialed one of the numbers he’d stored in his implants. A testy voice answered, “We spoke three hours ago. What now?”

“First off, this isn’t a secure line,” Sked replied.

“Got it.” Cyrano would know to keep names out of it.

“I have some bad guys on the ground.”

“We already knew that.”

“New ones this time.”

“Ah. Tell me more.”

“Technihilism. And they’ve got a quadhopper.”

Cyrano laughed. “You are a lucky bastard.”

“In what way does getting tangled up with those nutballs make me lucky?”

“In that I have the factory override codes for the model they’ve been cloning. Just make sure it isn’t a NATO job before you steal it.”

“You want me to steal a quadhopper from fucking Technihilism?”

“Unless you prefer to walk all the way back with the quadhopper looking for you, yeah.”

“Dammit,” Sked said. The people at the Shamán’s place would be confused, and probably in a world of pain, but they’d be lucid enough to mention that some gringo had waltzed in, wrecked the place, and waltzed out again. Technihilism would be very anxious to talk to that gringo… because they were probably the muscle behind the Shamán’s operation.

They wouldn’t be happy that someone had broken it.

They’d be even less happy if Sked managed to steal their hopper… but at least they’d also be stuck in the mountains of Peru for a while.

“Dammit,” he repeated.

Cyrano laughed, the laugh of a man who knew he was out of reach. “If you do manage to grab the quadhopper, let me know. I’m pretty sure I can snag you a buyer before you even decide where to land. We can go fifty-fifty.”

“I should have you killed sometime,” Sked said sourly.

“Nah. Whatever would you do without me? Take care of yourself, and we’ll talk again once you’re out of the line of fire.”

Cyrano signed off, and Sked shook his head. Had Cyrano actually admonished him to take care of himself? The old intermediary must be getting soft in his dotage. Either that, or he thought this was going to be a suicide mission.

Sked hoped he was wrong, but either way, he had no choice.

The first order of business was to get off the ledge. What had been a great spot to watch the Shamán’s people bumble around below had become a liability with the enemy in the air. He scrambled down as fast as possible, sending rocks showering onto anyone who might be waiting to ambush him.

No one awaited. The Shamán’s people must all have been recalled. And if that disembodied brain was more concerned with the people in the quadhopper than in catching and silencing Sked, then he should probably have been running in the opposite direction. The Shamán might have infrared binoculars, but Technihilism would have explosive drones that hunted for body heat.

“Dammit,” he said again.

The woods kept him hidden as he sprinted toward the complex. He hoped both factions would be too busy to spot him. About a hundred yards out, he slowed and began to advance tree by tree.

Forty yards away, he spotted a green-clad figure lying in the underbrush, thrashing in exquisite pain. Reaching around the person’s head, he put a hand over the mouth. Then he turned the body over.

It was Quillén. Her arm had been grazed by a bullet, and the green cloth of her jacket was stained black with blood, but it didn’t look like she should be in that much pain.

But she was. Her eyes were wide, all white. He could feel the muscles of her jaw clenching beneath his hand, and she was arching backward as if in agony.

“What is it?” he asked, pulling his hand away. “Softly.”

Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “I can hear him screaming…” Gasp. Pause. “In my head. Screaming. I feel his pain.” The last was louder, and he clamped his hand down again as she seemed about to scream herself. He couldn’t allow her to give them away.

Which begged the question—how many goons were out there? It wouldn’t be a small contingent. Technihilism was not a group that believed in the subtle art of warfare; they’d burn everything to the ground and dance on the embers.

Sked desperately wanted to check the clearing, but he couldn’t release Quillén.

He sighed. If anyone was out in the forest with a scanner, what he was about to do would give them away even quicker than if he let her scream and made a run for it.

His implants weren’t built for transmission. They were organic compounds—plastics, mainly—and ceramics, with exotic semiconductors thrown in for spice. Nothing in his head made a good antenna. But they did have a limited capacity for transmission, which he usually used to interfere with other people’s more standard implantation. He toggled the system and watched her eyes grow wide.

“What… what’s happening?”

“I shut off the transmission.”

“Thank you, I think… it was awful. Why was I hearing that?”

“I assume they’re sticking needles into the Shamán’s pain centers.”

She probably didn’t know the Shamán was a surgically extracted human brain, marinating in a tank of solution, wired into a complex network that allowed him to experience the world—and interact with the digital universe—on a level that meatbags like them could never even imagine. The downside, of course, was that it was kind of hard to move around without legs, so when the bad guys found you… you had to stay put and let them do their worst.

She surprised him by shaking her head. “Not that. I mean why was he in my head in the first place?”

“You really don’t know?”

“To be honest, I don’t remember much of anything from the past few… weeks? Months?”

He suspected it was probably a couple of years, but said nothing. She would find out without his help.

“You were implanted. Full mind control and, from what you’re telling me, a certain impairment of cognitive functions, 24/7. I assumed most of you had signed up for it.”

“I never agreed to anything. Hell, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be here in the first place. A bunch of my friends thought it would be fun, though.” She stared into space for a few minutes, and then her face clouded. “Wait… oh, crap, I’m starting to remember things.”

“If it makes you feel better, the bastard responsible for—” Sked realized he didn’t want to know what something like the Shamán would do with a beautiful girl who happened to fall into his lap. Even though, technically, he didn’t have a lap. “—whatever they did to you here,” he finished lamely, “is currently being tortured in a worse way than you can dream of. He’s in serious pain, with no way to shut it off. He won’t die, as long as they keep him hooked up to his machines. But you’ll have to work out your feelings later. Right now, we’ve got to steal a flying machine from some international criminals.”

“International criminals, here?” she asked. “What would they be doing?”

“The same thing your old boss was doing… trying to take over every mine in Bolivia. If I had to guess, I’d say he took some over through the traditional financial markets, and strong-armed the rest. Rare earths and copper. He was probably working for them, and they’re mad that someone sold his secrets all over the mindnet.”

She stared at him like he was speaking Chinese, and he reflected that maybe the cognitive impairment wasn’t all the implants’ fault.

“We need to get closer so I can have a look.”

The clearing told him nothing. The complex was pretty much as he remembered it, except there was a quadhopper parked in front of the main tower, and a couple of extra bodies strewn on the ground—the Shamán’s men. One guy was still alive, and though his leg was a bloody mess, he was actually grabbing his head and moaning weakly. Whatever they were doing to the Shamán must be pretty gnarly.

He grinned. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer disembodied brain.

“We need to get in closer,” he said.

“There are men in there who shot at me.”

“Yeah, and unless we grab that hopper, they’re going to hunt you down in the woods and shoot you.” He paused. “If you’re lucky.”

“And if I’m not?”

“You’ll get cyborged and sold to a Bangkok whorehouse. If more than half of you is artificial by weight, Thai law says you’re not human, but an artificial being. No rights, and they own you.”

She shuddered. “What can I do?”

He knew it was a bad idea before he said it, but he said it anyway. “Come with me. I’ll do my best to get you out, but if you slow me down, I leave you behind.”

Sked knew every friend he’d ever had would roll his eyes at this latest proof that he was an idiot. In fact, they’d be incredulous; always before, he’d been an idiot only where Akane was concerned. Now they’d know he was a knight in rusty armor for any woman with a problem.

He put on his fiercest scowl. “And we’re not saving any of your friends.”

She shrugged. “Fuck them. The few I knew before were the ones who got me into this… and the rest of them…”

There was a bitterness there he didn’t want to get into right now. If she broke down, he was going to have to leave her behind, foolish chivalry or no.

Keeping the mass of the hopper between themselves and the building, Sked led them closer. He opened his implants to the Wi-Fi system and was unsurprised to find that most of what was coming over the air was data he couldn’t interpret—probably the Shamán’s mind-control transmission, which was now broadcasting his agony into the heads of all his followers. The Technihilists had probably turned up the wattage as far as it would go, pumping out the pain to incapacitate all the brain’s allies.

Well, that was one set of bad guys they wouldn’t have to worry about.

It only left the ones who’d beaten them into submission.

“I’m going to peek around the hopper,” he told Quillén. “It’s quite possible there might be some shooting. Stay put.”

Sked stuck his head out, had a quick look, and pulled it back. He still couldn’t see anyone. Either they were all inside, or the guards were well hidden. They would have to be really stupid to leave the hopper unguarded.

But he had precisely zero options. Waiting to see what would happen was out of the question. He needed to strike now, while the bulk of the Technihilists was busy inside.

“Okay. Move,” he said.

Without waiting to see whether Quillén was with him or not, Sked rounded the corner, sprinted the length of the hopper, and reached the access ramp at the front.

That was where he found the guard.

The sentry was facing the other way but turned as he heard Sked approach. His eyes widened. His mouth opened to yell a warning. He tried to get his pistol out of his holster.

Without breaking stride, Sked scooped a rock from the ground, closed the gap between them, and slammed it into the top of his skull.

The guard fell with a whimper.

Sked wanted to run straight into the hopper, but he forced himself to bend over the prone sentry, unfasten the holster, and pull out the man’s gun. This situation went well beyond something he could possibly solve with his usual tools…

It felt weird to face the Technihilists in real life. They’d always been an online entity to him.

“Get in,” he told Quillén. She disappeared up the ramp, and Sked followed, dragging the bleeding and unconscious guard with him. The cockpit had two seats, so he sat in the one with more controls in front of it. The computer was on, so he checked the options, found the right menu, and entered Cyrano’s override code.

Manual control activated.

He would have said it was too easy… except he’d never flown one of these things. They were supposed to be easier than helicopters, which was little comfort, because he’d never flown one of those, either. “Hang on.”

He pulled up on the stick, and before he knew it, the vehicle was ten meters in the air and hovering. It wasn’t quite straight—Sked could see the clearing below out the left-hand window—but it was definitely a hover.

People poured out of the Shamán’s complex. Every light on his comm board lit up.

He shrugged and turned to Quillén. “Try to find the controls for the ramp. Do not press any button that isn’t clearly labeled ‘ramp.’ Do you understand?”

She nodded, wide-eyed, and began to run her fingers over the switch labels.

That done, Sked opened a channel to the guys on the ground.

“What the hell are you doing, Jürgen?” a voice said in French-accented English.

Sked pitched his voice low and attempted a German tone. Jürgen had to be German, didn’t he? “I’m sorry. Had to move the plane.”

“What? Why?”

He thought furiously, and then saw a control on the command stick that made him chuckle. “I realized we were parked on top of an endangered bush.”

“What?”

The guy on the ground didn’t have much of a vocabulary, but Sked couldn’t entertain him any further, because the hopper began drifting on him. He corrected toward the center, but went too far, and the aircraft slewed the other way, coming dangerously close to the trees.

The guys on the ground realized things were much worse than advertised. Guns came into the air.

Sked shouted, “Close that hatch!” and, at the same time, opened the failsafe—a transparent plastic box—and pressed the big red button on his control stick that had made him grin earlier.

The hopper shuddered as the heavy-caliber machine gun mounted in the nose opened up. Bullets flew wildly through the forest. A couple caught the building, and Sked saw white masonry fly out into the sky. But the chances of actually hitting anyone on the ground were nearly zero. He was bobbing around too much.

The guys down there didn’t know that, though. They dove for cover. A few of them ran inside.

“All right. Enough fun,” Sked said. “I’m flying west, toward the coast.”

He raised the vehicle above treetop level, rotated it 180 degrees, caught a couple of bobbles that threatened to send them to the ground, and hit the accelerator.

The thrust came on slowly, much more gradually than it should have, considering the way he’d manhandled the controls. The floater gained altitude and changed course gently.

Sked experienced a sinking feeling in his stomach. He wasn’t the one driving.

“Stop playing with the buttons and see if you can wake up the guy in back. I hope I didn’t kill him, because we’re going to need his help.”

Quillén disappeared from his sight as he wrestled with the stick and attempted to bring the computer back online. Nothing seemed to be responding to his ministrations.

A splash followed by a groan announced that Quillén was making progress with their prisoner.

“Screw it,” he said. He jumped out of the pilot’s seat and headed back. The guard looked up at him angrily. “You the pilot?” Sked demanded.

“You the moron?” the guard replied.

“Ah, a tough guy. Nice.” Sked made a show of studying his nails. “Unfortunately, the longer this fun little conversation lasts, the longer no one is flying this thing.”

The man paled. “You mean…”

Sked nodded.

“This isn’t a 747,” the guard said. “You can’t just put it on autopilot and leave it alone. These things are unstable.” He made a move to get up, but Sked planted a boot on his chest.

“No. And besides, as far as I can see, it is flying itself. And I want to know where it’s going.”

The guard closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the fear seemed to be gone. “You’re right. If it was uncontrolled, we’d be spiraling down by now. But I can’t help you. If it has a homing function, we’re going into northern Chile. But no one told me about anything like that.”

“Would they have told you?” Sked asked.

“I’m the pilot,” he was the indignant reply.

“So?”

The guy thought about it and sighed. “You’re right. They probably wouldn’t.”

“Great. So how do we turn it off?”

The pilot grinned at them. “You don’t. Anyone smart enough to build a self-piloting function into one of these would have been smart enough to make sure you couldn’t reach it from the pilot’s seat. I assume you’ll need to tear out half the wiring to get it to stop. As I’m a pilot, my professional recommendation is to avoid tearing out the wiring on a flying hopper.”

“Parachutes?”

“You’re kidding, right? We’re not a paratrooper division.” He smirked, enjoying their discomfiture. “I suppose we’ll get to find out where this is going.”

Sked briefly considered hitting the man but decided against it. So far, this had been business, pure and simple. If he antagonized the guy, it became personal. Nevertheless, the smirk had to go. “Yeah, but your main problem is, I don’t think we’re going back to your friends. I entered an override code that allowed me to unlock the controls when I came in… but I think I may have given the people who created the code access.”

The pilot’s expression changed to one of shock. “You entered an unknown code?”

“My other alternative was to walk back while you guys hunted me with IR. Not an attractive proposition, as I’m certain you’ll agree.”

At the same time, Sked wondered who Cyrano had sold him to. While they had a great working relationship, that relationship was based on the fact that Sked was worth much more as an active asset than he was as something to be sold to an enemy. Sked was well aware that the mathematics behind such a relationship could shift from one day to the next, particularly considering that Cyrano worked for at least one faction that wanted him dead, namely China… which was why you always kept yourself well shielded, and you always kept one bolt hole open.

This time, Sked had miscalculated. Was he about to pay the ultimate price?

Nothing to do but call. He used the hopper’s comms.

“You again?” Cyrano asked.

“Yeah, but I suppose this is the last time we’ll talk?”

“For a bit, yeah.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you just blew up a Technihilist plan to corner the copper and rare earth market at a time when both electric and electronic infrastructure is about to explode, thanks to the next-generation AI nets coming online. You cost them hundreds of billions… and once they identify you, it won’t take a genius to figure out I was the one pulling your strings.”

“I can take care of myself. Technihilist don’t scare me.”

“They should. They are crazy bastards,” Cyrano said.

“What scares me is this shuttle is taking me to an unknown destination.”

“Oh, that.” Cyrano’s voice was dismissive. “I’m just taking you to someone who wants to meet you.”

“Most people who want to meet me would prefer I emerge from said meeting in small pieces,” Sked replied.

“I trust you can take care of yourself. By the way, I just paid you for the job, plus a hefty bonus, because I sold the hopper.”

“With me in it.”

There was no reply to that, but Sked could almost hear Cyrano shrug over the line.

* * *

The hopper never made it to Chile. Instead, it stopped short, over a particularly rugged cluster of mountain peaks, and descended smoothly into a round concrete depression in a mountain. The fact that the pilot bravely allowed Sked to lead them out of the vehicle indicated it probably wasn’t his own home base.

Several armed men, wearing olive-green uniforms, searched them for weapons and relieved them of their shoes, their packs, and everything in their pockets.

“They’re clean,” one of the troops said into a handheld radio.

A roof irised closed above them, and Sked looked up at the noise. When his gaze returned to the soldiers, a woman stood among them. She had dark skin and long white hair, and Sked knew exactly who she was—bad news. Her name was Crimea, and the name said it all—if there was a crime she hadn’t committed, she was working to invent it.

“Are we having a cyber-criminal convention in the Andes this week?” Sked said. “I just finished running away from Technihilism.”

“If we were having a get-together,” the woman replied, her voice icy, “we would never have neglected to invite your friend, Akane. She might be a small-timer, but she has caused big-time havoc.” The woman held his gaze. “It might have been fun to watch the Triads carve her into bait. Now, are you going to listen to what I have to say? I brought you here at considerable expense… so if I can’t get your cooperation, I at least will get some entertainment.”

“I’ll listen.”

She nodded to the pilot and Quillén. “And them?”

“The girl is an innocent, a hostage with control implants. The other one is a pilot working for Technihilism.”

“I’ll deal with them later.”

Crimea gestured, and eight men fell in around Sked, four in front, four behind, while a round section of floor descended, taking the crime boss down with it.

“No smartfloor for you, hacker,” one of the troops said. “Follow us.”

The fact that they were being civil was a good sign, but there was no guarantee it would last.

An elevator took them down. Way down, into the bowels of the mountain. He was marched through a glossy, black-painted world to a spherical chamber with a platform in the center, illuminated by the images on the wall.

Crimea stood on the platform, watching the screens, and manipulating images by waving her hands. The image coalesced into a bad, old picture of Sked with a large number underneath it.

“That’s not my phone number,” Sked said.

The cold eyes met his. “No, that’s the reward Technihilism has put on your head. I’m tempted to claim it myself but, annoying as you seem to be, you’ve never done anything to inconvenience me, except for a couple of times when you stumbled into one of my operations because you were in someone else’s employ. I don’t discard tools because I disagree with the people who wield them.” She paused. “But that number doesn’t indicate that you’ll be safe in any of your usual haunts.”

“Yeah, I was thinking of taking a boating tour around the world… spending time on a sailboat without internet is a good way for people to forget about you. Especially if you return as a different person.”

“Which you’ve done before. You were once notorious as Brown. Now you’re Sked. Next?”

He shrugged. “I have several ready aliases. None of which will be forthcoming.”

She laughed. “That’s wise. All right. Enough talk. I have a job for you that will solve a problem for me and will solve that problem—” she pointed at the screen “—for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“There are places that are a little too controlled for me to be able to walk in and do my thing. My people, likewise. But they’re always in need of certain technical skills… skills you have.”

“I would have imagined you would be able to buy your way into anything.”

“On Earth? Sure. But the shuttle to Daedalus carries only forty passengers. There’s no way to sneak one of my people aboard. But you? They’ll let you in without blinking.”

Daedalus was the huge billionaire’s playground in orbit. It was humanity’s most expensive undertaking ever. “Why would they want to let me in?”

“Because you applied for a job, and you got it. If they’d chosen a different hacker, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” She flashed him a grin with more than a little madness in it. “And you didn’t even have to lie on your résumé. Congratulations.”

He stood, mouth agape.

“It comes with a huge salary, plus what I’ll pay you for building me a backdoor into their financial systems.” Seeing he still wasn’t responding, she added, “And Technihilism can’t touch you there. You can lie low, in plain sight, thumbing your nose at all of them.”

Still, he hesitated.

“Or I can kill you now,” she said, “and talk to the next guy they accept.”

“All right. I’ll do it. You need a backdoor?”

“I’ve just sent all the data to your online address. Hope that’s all right. You can review it on the shuttle. One of my people will give you the one-time key for the encryption.”

He nodded, and the troops led him deeper into the mountain. He wasn’t out of the woods, but at least he’d bought some time.

The big question was, was it better to be cut off from everything in orbit, or cut off from everything in the mountains of Peru?

Apparently, he was about to find out.

* * * * *

Chapter 19

Daedalus Station, Low Earth Orbit – Six Months Later

I consider the job complete. The money is in your account, and your rent is paid up until the end of the month.

Sked grimaced. He’d known Crimea wouldn’t keep him around after he’d done what she wanted, but the logistics of the end of this job were bad. Normally, when you stopped working for a client, you took a cab and went home to spend your earnings.

That wasn’t an option when your home was four hundred miles straight down. Also, the closest thing he had to a home was a storage facility in Bangkok where he stuffed the things he’d bought over the years when he got tired of lugging them around.

Worse, the Daedalus Space Station made it really tough to leave.

Technically, that wasn’t true. You could leave any time you desired. But if you also wanted air and a controlled descent into the atmosphere, you had to take the shuttle, which was so expensive that people had lost their liberty to indentured servitude because they couldn’t pay for it and preferred not to be tossed out of an airlock.

Fortunately for Sked, that wasn’t his problem. His problem was, as soon as he landed, Technihilism’s goons would get into a fight with the People’s Liberation Army’s goons over which of them got to take him back to their base and cut him into small pieces.

Ping! went the incoming message alert on his laptop.

Your work permit has been cancelled. You have two shuttle cycles to leave the station.

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” he said. “So nice to feel welcome.”

But he was just blowing off steam. He’d known this day was coming. He needed to execute an out plan.

His first option was to try to get a transfer to one of the orbiting industrial platforms, but that was going to take a little work, and not the kind he’d been doing for Crimea.

Sked dressed in his best shirt and slacks—the uniform of the billionaires on board—and headed up the hall. Instead of going deeper into the support areas, where the people who made the station function lived, ate, slept, and loved in the lower gravity near the spinning hub, he used his passkey to open a trapdoor in the floor that opened onto a ladder concealed behind a curtain in the main guest area.

Plush carpeting covered every surface, muffling his footsteps. The bill to bring rolls of carpet into orbit—even with the constantly diminishing cost of launch—must have been astronomical.

The air in this section smelled better. On the service side, the smells were industrial: oil, ozone, the occasional sweaty body. Here, it was all jasmine and the subtle scent of baking bread. All artificial, Sked knew; one of his first responsibilities had been to fine tune the program that decided when each scent would be strongest. It was early afternoon station time, so the baking smell would be at its peak.

Even the gravity felt better, but that, of course, was real. Daedalus Station’s crew and living areas were spun for gravity, with the staff areas on the inside, and the paying guests on the outside. The billionaires had, unless they specifically preferred to keep to the low-gee playgrounds, better gravity.

Sked walked down the hall like he belonged, assuming a role he’d played more times than he could count. Hell, he might not be a billionaire, but he’d done enough big jobs that he had more money than he could spend over the course of his life.

Unfortunately, unless he could find a solution to his current problem, he wouldn’t be able to spend it; his life expectancy would be measured in hours.

He reached the casino door, one of the few places Daedalus bothered to post visible guards. Thimir stood at one side of the door, and his eyes widened as he saw Sked approach. “I don’t think I can let you in,” he said.

“Actually, I’m all paid up. Cover charge, minimum number of chips, the works,” Sked replied.

Thimir blinked as he checked his implants. Sked shuddered to think he would have allowed himself to be implanted just to get a job working for billionaires. Of course, most people, even security guards, lived their lives, blissfully unaware of just how bad it was to have metal implants in your head.

Finally, the guard blinked a final time and said, “Apparently, you check out. Do you actually have a room in the Palace Pavilion?”

“I do. I have a little money saved up.”

“And they let you in?”

Sked grinned. “Loophole in the system. The station doesn’t give visas to just anyone… but once you’re here, you’re allowed to do anything your pocketbook can survive.”

“And you can survive at the Palace?”

“Until my visa expires at the end of the month… yes.”

Sked stepped past his acquaintance, and, with that act, he left behind six months of his life he would definitely miss. Six months in which his skills were used legitimately by the station for trivial tasks like program optimization, while he was also illegally handing Crimea the data she needed to hack into nearly every hyperbillionaire on Earth.

The really good part, though, was that he didn’t have to look over his shoulder in case one of the factions chasing him snuck up behind him. His position as head of station security made it easy to spot people coming after him. Sked had dozens of safeguards in place, checking everyone who got a job on the station after the day he arrived.

He’d felt completely safe and relaxed for the first time in years.

Except for his occasional forays into the guest areas. There was no way to double-check all the actual guests, so he needed to be extremely careful at all times. But getting off the station required talking to people he wouldn’t meet in the service sector. He needed to find a contact he could use.

Screw that, he thought. Let’s see how the tables treat me.

He went over to a blackjack table and played a few hands. Ten minutes later, he left with most of his chips still in his possession, an auspicious start.

And then he saw her.

Worse, she was staring straight at him.

Sked shrugged, walked over to the roulette table, and laid a small-denomination chip on red.

“What a timid wager,” the woman said.

She was wearing a slinky black cocktail dress that set off her pale skin perfectly. Her makeup was subtle—flesh-toned lips, barely glossed, and just a hint of mascara—which made her look a million times better than the kind of woman who poured on the makeup from a bucket. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been going by the unassuming name of Caroline Duarte, and she’d been working as a tech in the service area.

They’d actually spent a couple of nights together until, one day, she abruptly told him her visa was up, and she was headed planetside the following day.

He didn’t think he’d ever see her again.

Particularly not at a billionaire’s playground, looking like she could pretty much beckon to any of the people in there and have them drag themselves to her on their knees.

“It doesn’t always pay to be bold from the outset. Sometimes, it makes sense to study the terrain first,” he replied.

The wheel stopped spinning, the ball on 30. He picked up his winnings and put the same small amount on black this time, watching with a smirk as her much larger wager was added to the bank’s haul.

“This time, timidity seems to have paid dividends,” he said.

She pulled another large denomination chip from her pile and, not letting her eyes leave his, she simply said, “Timidity never pays dividends.” Then she placed the chip on the spot reserved for wagers on the green zero.

“Eleven,” the croupier announced, and Sked pocketed his chips.

“I can buy you a drink,” he said.

“I’m not interested in a drink, but you can buy us a night in a Mist Globe.”

He held her gaze and said, “Would that be wise?”

“You’ll never know unless you do it. Maybe this is the time to go all in.”

“Why do I feel like I’m going to regret this?” he said.

She walked around the table and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, I promise you won’t regret a thing,” she said in a throaty voice. “It might get you killed, but you won’t regret it.”

He left the casino at her side.

* * *

Mist Globes. The words conjured images of zero-gee bliss, billionaire sensations that normal people could only read about.

Take one enormous plastic ball, twenty feet in diameter, and fill it with nets, hammocks, and the most perfectly stocked minibar in the solar system. Saturate it with tiny droplets of warm water, constantly recirculated and reheated by a dedicated system, and then let it float free in the pressurized but zero-gee central section of the station, bouncing gently off all the other spheres in the place.

The sensation was like being in a thick, warm fog, a sauna with much larger droplets. Everything turned to white shadow; it was impossible to see clearly across the room. The lack of visibility heightened the other senses, and the soft, caressing feeling of floating Mist Globes was reputed to be one of the joys of space travel.

It was a popular attraction, and since the outer skins could be polarized into one-way transparency, they were perfect for zero-gee trysts, a new sensation for jaded lovers who’d done and seen it all… they could do and see some new things without being seen themselves.

Nights in a Mist Globe were also expensive as hell, which, Sked thought, was probably why she’d chosen this particular activity.

“Told you you wouldn’t regret it,” she said as she luxuriated on a hammock, her flushed nakedness covered only with condensed droplets.

Sked tore his eyes away. “The jury’s still out on that,” he replied, “but you’re right that I’m not regretting it so far.”

“Good.” She smiled.

“So what’s your real name?”

The smile instantly became a pout. “Can’t you even let a girl relax for five minutes after you use her, you brute?”

“If I recall, this was your idea. And it’s better to talk here. These spheres are free of interior listening devices. They used to have them, but the vapor played havoc with them, so the station replaced them with panic buttons instead.”

“You seem to know a lot about that.”

Sked smiled. “I spent a boring, routine time as the head of cyber-security. I had to get up to speed on all the systems, including the whys and wherefores. The funniest thing about that surveillance are the transcripts. Some of the analysts would write ‘sex sounds,’ which is kind of boring, when you consider that others made an attempt to write out the sounds. So ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ would figure prominently. Brilliant stuff.”

She laughed and drank from a specially designed glass that functioned in microgravity, sipping a red whose vintage had little relationship to its astronomical price tag. “And you’re just the kind who’d read that kind of thing.”

“Yeah, I really was that bored,” Sked replied.

“I take it you’re not passionate about making a career of Daedalus Station security protocols, so what are you doing here?”

“Nice try. I asked you first. For some reason, I’m having trouble fitting the name Caroline Duarte with the woman in front of me.”

“Why?” she asked, stretching suggestively.

He was all business now. “Because it seems way too domestic. It’s not the kind of name someone under deep cover would really be called.”

“You’re assuming a lot,” she replied.

“I’d bet I’m probably more right than wrong.”

“Another timid bet,” she said. “Yeah, that’s not really my name. Except I kept the initials. My real name wouldn’t mean much to you. I don’t use it for anything except to visit my parents. But you might know me as Cara Dyne.”

“Holy shit,” Sked said. “You’re telling the truth?”

“Can you think of any possible way posing as Cara Dyne could lead anyone to anything but a world of hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then take my word for it.”

“I wish I didn’t have to.” Everyone knew who Cara Dyne was. They had plenty of names for her. Chameleon Death. Concealed Destruction. Caress Devastation. She was known as the ultimate iron fist in a velvet glove… and no one knew what she looked like.

“Oh, come on. I’ll change my face again once this is done. It won’t be necessary to kill you for seeing me like this.” She looked him up and down. “Besides, I like you.”

“How does that change anything?” Sked said.

She shrugged. “It answers your next question, which is ‘why’d I tell you the truth?’ And my answer is, I told you the truth because now that you know who I am, you know I can help you. I already know you’re in deep. You were playing some game back when we were both hunkering down on the service side of things… and now the game’s up, so you’re out in the open, trying to put something together. Is it money?”

“I have money.”

“What, then?”

He stayed stubbornly silent but, for the first time, thought about his options. The Globes weren’t designed to be easily exited from. The last thing the habitat wanted was to have to rescue and placate naked billionaires plucked from a zero-g zone because they fell out of their bubble. If she wanted him dead, he would likely be dead before he made it out the door. That was her reputation, at least, and though he was well-trained, he didn’t want to put it to the test.

He sighed. “My name is Sked. I used to be known as Brown. I’m a hacker.”

She blinked once, her striking gray eyes flashing open and shut like the shutter on a camera, then replied, “More than a hacker. You do fieldwork, too. I’ve heard of some of your work. Panama. Hong Kong. You run with a strange crowd… so what brings you here?”

“Expediency. I’ve been doing a job for a lowlife crime boss because she offered me a visa onto Daedalus. None of the people who want me dead can infiltrate this place without me seeing them.”

“And now?”

“Visa’s up at the end of the month.”

“Ah. And you can’t go back.”

“I can go back. I’ll be dead, but I can go.” He wondered how much he should trust her, then sighed and realized he had no choice at all. “My plan is to get a position on another orbital platform under a different name, and then try to get back on one of the return flights before they manage to track me.”

She thought about it for a second. “That sounds like exactly what they’d be expecting you to do. Hell, I knew you only by reputation, and if you’d asked me what I think you’d have done, I’d have suspected it would be something sneaky.”

Sked smiled. “The point about sneaky is, if you can move quickly enough, it works even when they’re expecting it. That’s why people pay me; I can sneak around people who are expecting sneaky.”

“And you can project a physical threat once your sneakiness gets you in, right?”

“Exactly,” he said. “If I can get back to Earth without getting shot at the choke points, I can pretty much disappear. I can move faster on my own than they can move teams to run me down… and I can deal with anyone operating alone.”

Cara threw her head back and laughed. “I could have killed you a dozen times since we met.”

“Yes, but you were on the station three weeks before I even knew I was coming here. If you hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near you.”

Her dark eyes twinkled. “You know, everyone thinks that, until one second before I kill them.” She floated over to him, laying her hand on his chest. “If you try to jump around the orbital settlements, they’ll catch you. I know how we need to do this.”

“We?”

“Well, you, but I’m proposing to partner up. I need a favor, and I think you’re just the guy to help me with a job. In exchange, I’ll help you get back to Earth.”

“And here I thought you brought me here because you liked me.”

“That was before you told me who you were. But I still like you, and we’re paying for all this mist. We might as well take advantage of it.”

By the time they got back to the station, he’d agreed to help her carry out a murder.

That usually wasn’t his style, but at least the mark seemed to deserve it.

* * *

“If he’s asexual, we’re screwed,” Sked said for the hundredth time.

For the hundredth time, Cara replied that she’d seen the mark ogling the waiters, the croupiers, and anyone else on the station who was male, young, and had a pulse.

“I’m still stunned anyone would have sent you after a gay man,” he said with a chuckle.

“They thought it was a front. He’s never been seen with a man but, according to my client’s spies, several women have visited his complex at odd hours of the night.”

“And it turns out that was the front.”

“Apparently. Either that, or I’m not his type, and he isn’t in the mood for any of the working girls aboard.”

“You’re everyone’s type,” Sked told her, “but if he’s asexual, we’re not going to get this done.”

“If he’s asexual, I’ll walk up to him and shoot him in the face.”

“Station security won’t take kindly to that. They’ll toss you out the nearest airlock.”

“I know. But I haven’t failed yet,” she replied, her face taking on a determined cast, “and I’m not going to start now.”

That conversation had taken place two hours earlier, in Cara’s room. Now, Sked found himself looking over a blackjack table at the sweating features of a bald, dusky-skinned Brazilian who, if Cara was to be believed, had made his billions as a conduit, operating dozens of pipelines moving both low- and high-tech drugs fabricated in one part of the world into others.

Brazilian CaipiDream to Brussels. Colombian cocaine to Australia. Romanian Niku to Seattle. Chinese Datadrug everywhere.

He could get whatever you wanted into a country with no history of drug smuggling, and from there to the unsuspecting market whose overworked police forces were looking in a different direction.

Need to get something into Amsterdam? Send it into Paris via Algeria, and then put it on the train. The trick was to have the pipelines open and not to use them too frequently.

Their target was a logistical genius and lived large on the income.

Sked watched a bead of sweat trickle down the man’s cheek. He didn’t mind being obvious about it—he wanted the guy to notice, after all.

He would have liked to think he was on the side of the angels on this one, that this man’s death had been ordered by some government tired of having ten percent of its youth condemned to an adulthood of wheelchair use by having their brains blasted to bits by Datadrug overuse, which supposedly made implant surfing an incredible experience. That wasn’t likely. Cara kept her client’s name to herself, but Sked knew how these things worked—a competitor needed to free up some market share or, even more likely, an underling wanted to clear the road to the top. The drug would continue to flow, and Joao Paredes would be nothing more than another corpse on the highway.

Even if it was just a criminal hit, Sked had no particular qualms about helping him on his way, and all he needed was to get close enough for a really good look into his eyes.

Joao looked up across the table.

Sked ignored every instinct and held the man’s gaze.

“Someone is looking to take my money,” the logistician said with a half-smile.

Sked indicated the table with a nod of his head. “That’s why we play the game, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re playing a longer game,” the man replied.

The dealer chose that moment to begin giving out the cards. Sked received a face-up ace and caught Joao’s eye. “Looks like this is going to be easier than I thought. How’s this; if I clean you out, I’m buying the drinks,” he said.

Joao’s half-smile didn’t waver as the dealer gave him a six. “You must really think a lot of yourself,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll take you up on that drink and find out why.”

An hour later, Sked, his pile of chips considerably engorged by Joao’s losses, finally declared, “Well, I’m out.” He looked across the table. “Want to take advantage of the free drink?”

“I might as well,” the portly Brazilian groused. “It’s not like my luck is going to turn anytime soon.”

What the hell have I got myself into? Sked wondered as he followed the other man into the bar. Though he’d been a part of countless honey-trap operations, he’d never thought of himself as the honey in the trap—not even when the target was male.

Cara’s assurances that he would be even more effective because he didn’t look like the typical boy-toy snare were decidedly not comforting just about then.

Fortunately, the drug lord didn’t herd him into a darkened booth tucked into the back of the bar, but chose a high, round table in a well-lit area.

“What will you have?” Sked said. He hoped his voice didn’t sound as nervous as he felt.

“Vodka. No ice.”

Sked fidgeted as the server rummaged behind the bar and brought them their drinks.

“So tell me,” Joao said. Then he lifted his glass, drank the entire contents of it in one long chug, and put it down on the table. Leaning forward, he looked straight into Sked’s eyes. He was so close, Sked thought Joao was going to try to kiss him. So close he could smell the slight scent of the vodka on the other man’s lips.

Sked tensed as Joao didn’t move. Was he going to have to go through with it, to kiss this disgusting creature, to keep up appearances? He didn’t want to, but the two bodyguards who’d followed them in were about twice Sked’s size—and Sked wasn’t a small man. Making a run for it would likely end badly.

Joao began to talk, breathing into Sked’s mouth. “Better still, don’t tell me. Whatever scam you’re running, you’re wasting your time. I don’t like men who make it too easy. If you were just after my money, you might have been interesting… for a week or so. But the fact that you’re here tells me money isn’t a problem for you. You aren’t registered as one of the station prostitutes, either. And my scanner—” he held up a finger on which a large ruby ring bulged prominently “—tells me you aren’t even implanted.” He pulled away, and Sked had to use all his self-control to avoid sighing in relief as the man continued, “Which means you’re playing some kind of long con, maybe even trying to infiltrate my organization.”

The bodyguards moved closer. “So, if you come near me again, if I happen to run into you in a hallway, or even if I happen to catch a glimpse of you in a restaurant, I will have Klaus and Pyotr, here—” Joao gestured to the bookends looming menacingly close “—throw you out the nearest airlock. I’m sure I’ll be able to explain it to the authorities, and though I have no idea who you might be, when they start looking into your past, I’m quite certain my protestations of your lack of innocence will be understood. No one cares if a grifter gets spaced. Now get the hell out of my sight, you unbearable little shit.”

Pretending to be cowed, Sked left the bar and headed straight toward Cara’s room.

She was still laughing when he came through the door. Laughing so hard, in fact, that an actual tear was rolling down her cheek from a beautiful gray eye. “That was priceless,” she said, pointing at the screen in front of her. “You should have seen how your heartrate went through the roof when he leaned in for the kiss. Are you sure you weren’t enjoying it?”

“I’m sure,” Sked replied darkly.

She suddenly turned serious. “Did you get it?”

“Of course I did. At that range, I got it in super-high definition in all wavelengths. I’m transmitting it now.”

The image of an eye appeared on the screen of Cara’s laptop, and Sked shuddered. He hadn’t wanted to see Joao’s eyes up close ever again. Especially not so soon.

“Well, you set the clumsiest sex trap I’ve ever seen, and I really thought you were going to run away screaming a couple of times, there… but I can’t argue with the results.” She studied him pensively. “But how come his scanner didn’t pick up your implants?”

Cara Dyne was close to last on the list of people Sked would have felt comfortable sharing the truth of his organic implants with. The only people who ranked behind her worked for the Chinese Communist Party or for Technihilism. You didn’t tell secrets that were likely to get you killed to an assassin you only knew from a few weeks of an on-and-off sexual liaison.

“They’re shielded, of course. I wouldn’t be much of a hacker if I couldn’t keep curious bystanders from spotting me a mile away, would I?”

“I suppose,” she replied. She didn’t appear to be paying any more attention to Sked. She was bent over a black box hooked to the laptop. The box shook for a few seconds before pinging.

Cara fished around inside for some moments. Her hand emerged holding a round white ball.

She turned it toward Sked.

And he found himself looking into Joao’s eye again. It was a perfect copy, right down to the vitreous liquid oozing off it.

“That is gross,” he said.

“This is going to get us into his room,” she replied.

“Get you into his room,” Sked replied. “I’m not the murderer here.”

“The word is assassin. And fine, if you’re squeamish, I’ll do that part myself, but I need you to distract the guards for me.” She held up a hand. “Nothing violent. All you need to do is just pretend you don’t know me and walk up to them. I’ll take it from there.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it. You just need to trust me. After all, I’m the one giving you the groundside support you need.”

Sked shut up. If he was ever going to get past the reception committee that would be waiting for him when the shuttle landed, he was going to have to go through with whatever Cara needed to get her job done first.

“All right. When do we move?”

“An hour before we board the shuttle.”

“That won’t give us much time for contingencies.”

“It also won’t give the station authorities time to find the bodies. So we’d better get it right the first time.”

“That’s five hours from now,” he said.

“Good. It’ll give you time to prove you weren’t tempted by the Brazilian guy,” she said, winking at him and disappearing into the bedroom, disrobing as she went.

“Ugh,” he replied. “I may never be able to get it up again.”

But he followed her.

* * *

Cara walked a few meters ahead of him, and Sked wondered when they were going to be caught. This was the residential part of the station—each hallway led to a couple of billionaire residences, so random people strolling along the wrong passage would stand out. And while Sked had a reason—albeit a really weak one—for heading toward Joao’s quarters, Cara had none at all to be walking down the hall, especially considering she was dressed for a romantic assignation, and the occupant of the other unit was a Federation Council member from Russia visiting with his wife.

It made no difference, however. The two large bodyguards in front of Joao’s room didn’t stop to wonder whether Cara belonged there when she passed without a second glance. They simply followed her with their eyes, undressing her in their imaginations.

Or at least they did until they realized Sked was approaching.

“Are you completely stupid?” the nearest asked when he saw him. “I thought the boss was very clear about what would happen if he saw you again.”

Sked stopped. He hadn’t actually rehearsed what he wanted to say when he arrived. “I just wanted to talk to the boss… I mean Joao. He didn’t let me explain. I mean, I can explain everything and…”

“You’re going out the fucking airlock,” Klaus said. Or maybe it was Pyotr. It made no difference to Sked; he never paid attention to low-level muscle except to keep tabs on their movements so he could take them out when needed.

When they took a step forward, he took a step back and raised his hands ineffectually, trying to look like a frightened boy-toy.

After another step forward, Klaus or Pyotr slapped the side of his neck. A moment later, the movement was mirrored by the other brainless slab of muscle.

Sked expected them to collapse to the floor. Instead, they started chuckling. Then one of them laughed. Then the other.

“Man,” one said. “We’re not going to hurt you. Did you really think that?”

He laughed like it was the funniest thing ever.

“Did you hear that, Klaus? He thought we were going to toss him out the airlock for being a little puto. Don’t worry, we won’t kill you, puto.” He laughed.

Klaus looked at him sternly. “Don’t say those words, the boss doesn’t like them.”

Then his serious face cracked, and he guffawed.

Cara walked up. “Good work,” she said to Sked. “You had them completely convinced. I’m impressed.”

“Not as much as I am,” Sked replied. “I thought you’d just knock them out, and we’d have to drag them inside.”

“Too many cameras for that,” Cara replied. “Someone was bound to notice if the bodyguards dropped. Isn’t it better that we’re all friends now?”

“What did you use?”

“It’s a secret.” She winked. “Like those implants of yours that take high-rez photos but don’t pop up on scanners.” She turned to the bodyguards. “Guys, I need to go inside.”

“Are you going to try to fuck the boss? He don’t like that kind of stuff. He likes boys, not girls. I’ll fuck you, though.” He laughed like he’d said the funniest thing ever.

“Me, too,” the other bit of muscle chirped.

“You’re very nice-looking,” she replied, “but I don’t have time right now. I’m here to kill your boss.”

“That’s funny. We always knew he’d get killed. But we can’t let you in. You need an eye.” They laughed.

She showed them the white orb. “I brought an eye,” she replied. “Let’s go inside.”

This seemed to be the funniest thing Klaus and Pyotr had ever heard.

Sked stood outside the door and waited for her.

Cara emerged four minutes later and started to walk down the hall.

“How was it?” Sked asked, matching her stride. He knew one didn’t ask Cara Dyne if it was done. If she walked away from the scene, it was done, and there would be no witnesses.

“Messy,” she said.

He glanced over and saw that her face was covered with tiny dark spots—droplets of blood. “You might want to wipe your face,” Sked said.

She brushed her sleeve over her skin and sighed.

“So messy,” she said.

* * *

After the opulence of Daedalus Station, the gray and utilitarian shuttle should have been a serious comedown.

Sked was too nervous for comedowns, but he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or scared when the airlock cycled, and the clamps retracted.

Cara, on the other hand, was perfectly chirpy when the shuttle rolled on its axis away from Daedalus and headed toward Earth. “Well, the station can’t grab us now,” she said.

“Yeah. All I need to worry about is one criminal syndicate that I know of. Possibly more. Oh, and the People’s Liberation Army. Plus the police, if the station finds the bodies before we get down.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about the PLA. They’ll have hired goons and not sent any of their really good people. They won’t want to cause an incident at a travel hub in New Jersey.”

“Still not comforting,” Sked said.

“Will you relax? They’ll never expect what we’ve got planned. They’ll expect trickery, not brute force. So they’ll track you in the terminal and try to grab you when you exit the building. We’ll have plenty of space to work.”

“We? You’re coming with me?”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world. There’s nothing more fun than an abduction squad that runs into a crew that’s shooting to kill. The look on their faces will be priceless.”

Sked held to stubborn silence for the rest of the trip down, reviewing the plan in his head. He had to walk in certain halls, take certain turns, and emerge through a particular door for everything to work out. He went through the images in his mind until he was certain he had it down pat. “After this is over, we’ll need to talk about why you’re really keeping me alive.”

“After this is over, I think you’ll know,” she replied.

He wanted to ask her what she meant, but the shuttle touched down, landing like a regular airliner and taxiing to the terminal.

“Relax,” Cara said, squeezing his shoulder. “This will be a piece of cake. Everything is planned down to the last detail.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “That’s what’s worrying me. If anything goes bad, the whole operation goes bye-bye. It’s too dependent on precision.”

“It will be fine. Let’s move.”

They followed the crowd down the endless gray hallways that kept the returning spacefaring billionaires away from regular plane passengers and entered the customs booth.

Sked shrugged and used his real passport. The whole point of the exercise was to make certain the parties after him would know he was there… but also be on the lookout for some kind of ID-swapping sleight-of-hand.

“Thank you, Mr. Brown, welcome back to the United States,” the man behind the glass said.

“Thank you,” Sked replied. He walked to the baggage claim and found his single black travel bag waiting for him. Before heading for the exit, he fished his laptop out of the bag and hung the carrying satchel on his shoulder. He couldn’t envision actually making it out of this phase of the operation with a large rolling suitcase in tow, so he wanted to make sure he managed to hold on to the important information in his computer.

And though all the data was backed up, he really didn’t want to lose yet another high-end deck.

Now came the tricky bit.

Pretending not to know her, he boarded the AirTrain to Terminal B. They descended and headed to the taxi offload zone upstairs, where departing passengers entered the airport. The move was designed to make their pursuers assume that Sked was going to be picked up by a random cab or minivan and focus their attention on the incoming traffic.

Cara stopped at a store that sold magazines, candy, and I Love New York t-shirts. That was his signal to procrastinate for a bit. The bad guys, evidently, needed time to get their shit together.

He wished he could listen in on Cara’s tactical comms net, but they had assumed whoever was waiting would have some kind of listening capability trained on Sked. So he had to let her communicate with the people helping them. He definitely didn’t want to reveal his implants.

She started walking again, heading toward door 11.

Instead of following, Sked made his way to door 13 and emerged into a cold, blustery New Jersey afternoon. Low, gray clouds floated densely overhead, and the wind tore at his coat. Against every instinct, he put his hands in his pockets and walked the fifteen meters from the sliding glass doors, past a group of porters warming their hands, to the edge of the road. He pretended to look out over the arrayed taxis and Ubers.

He spotted two separate pockets of movement on either side. This would be the hostile reception committees. Two of them, uncoordinated, by the looks of it. He hoped they’d get in each other’s way.

He casually ambled along the curb, pretending not to see the pursuit. He hated this part, but sometimes you had to trust your crew. This was a good crew; with Cara’s help, they’d gotten the best of the best in urban combat specialists.

The kidnappers had no clue what was coming for them and, best of all, they were looking the wrong way. They were looking toward the road, out at the taxis.

The first group was twelve meters away when Sked pretended to see them. They redoubled their pace, the leader shouting orders.

A moment later, the leader clapped a hand against his neck, in almost exactly the same gesture as Joao’s bodyguard just a few hours earlier, and fell to his knees. This time, they hadn’t bothered with the soft stuff. The guy was out, unconscious or dead, and Sked didn’t care which.

That group came to a confused halt, torn between figuring out what had befallen their leader and coming after Sked.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sked saw that the porters who’d been trying to alleviate the cold were now all standing in formation, aiming needle guns at his assailants.

The bad guys were as good as dosed.

Sked turned his attention to the second group. They were charging in from slightly behind the first, and from the direction of the doors. They didn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong.

An icy fist gripped Sked’s innards.

“Damn it,” he said. He toggled his implants and opened up on the number he knew was Cara’s. He didn’t even bother to subvocalize.

“Watch out! There’s something really strange about the second group. I don’t like it.”

While he spoke, Cara’s shooters accounted for the final members of the first group.

“Why the hell are you calling me? Are you trying to give up the game?” Cara asked. “Well, it’s been nice knowing you. Now that everyone knows you have shielded implants, you’re toast.” She suddenly cursed. “Sked, the second group isn’t responding to the poison darts.”

So much for humane treatment of kidnappers, he thought. “Told you,” he said.

He had no time for further banter. The leader of the second group of bad guys had reached him. He had to buy some time for the cavalry to arrive, so he swung a fist in the general direction of the leader’s head, and prepared to dive behind a pile of luggage.

His fist sailed right through the thug’s face, and Sked’s graceful evasion maneuver became an inelegant stumble.

His confusion only lasted for a second.

“Holograms,” he told Cara. “Watch out for the real ones.”

“Where are they?”

He scanned the boarding area, trying to separate significant coordinated movement from the tourists who’d realized something was going on and were beginning to scatter in random directions.

Gunfire answered his question, and his heart sank.

It was coming from inside the terminal.

Behind his guardian angels.

And there was a whole hell of a lot of it.

Sked watched the faux porters hit the ground. Some appeared to be taking cover, but a couple seemed to have taken headshots.

“You okay?” he asked Cara.

No one answered.

He tried to spot her in the crowd, but he couldn’t catch sight of her. He hoped his comm activity hadn’t set the kidnappers on her trail.

He tried to identify the enemy, to understand which faction they might belong to. Knowing the forces who really wanted him dead, it was hard to tell which would be more likely to charge arrogantly at him to try to pull off a daytime kidnapping, and which would assume trickery and prepare a counterstrike. Both the Chinese and Technihilism could be thuggish or subtle when the mood struck them, and depending on which particular mastermind was in charge that day.

“Hello,” a voice in his implants said. “This is Deux Machina.”

“Buddha?” Sked said, not bothering to subvocalize. “I’m kinda busy right now.” Of course the Electric Buddha knew enough not to try to contact him on the space station, but Sked wished it had chosen a better time to rekindle their relationship.

“I am aware. I strongly advise you to approach the black Mercedes van coming up the road at high speed.”

Sked knew better than to question the Buddha’s advice. The sentient computer had pulled him out of a dozen scrapes, a few of which were even worse than this one. He tore his eyes from the firefight and turned to stare out at the line of cars, some of which, boxed in, were frantically honking their horns.

He spotted the van on the outermost lane and shuddered. Years of bad spy flicks had conditioned him to the fact that black Mercedes Benzes were infallibly driven by the bad guys.

Ignoring that inner voice, he dashed out into the road, pushing aside an overweight man with a huge luggage cart who cursed him in Spanish, echoed by his apparently infinite number of children and a wife dressed in a green dress and red heels.

The van screeched to a halt five meters away, and the door slid open. A thin figure dressed in black appeared in the doorway and leveled a bazooka at his head.

Sked dove to the ground as the projectile whooshed overhead and headed toward the terminal.

A moment later, a shock of thunder washed over him. He thought it would hammer his ears into his skull. His vision blurred, and he slammed into the ground face first when he tried to get onto his hands and knees.

He barely resisted when strong arms plucked him off the pavement and tossed him unceremoniously into the back of the van.

Sked’s head hit something hard, and he felt himself drifting off.

Well, he thought to himself, at least I tried to make a run for it.

His final thought before the darkness took him was a cyanide pill would have saved him a long and painful torture session.

* * *

“So,” he said groggily when he managed to get his eyes open, but then shut them because the light hurt his eyes, “which group of assholes managed to grab me?”

“Will you shut up?” a voice said. “You’ve probably got a concussion.”

“Not so loud,” he said, grimacing. “Well, not unless you’re determined to start the torture session in the car.”

“Sked, look at me.”

“Can’t. Eyes hurt.”

“Try.”

Seeing no point in antagonizing his captors even more than he already had, Sked obeyed, peering through half-closed lids. “Akane?”

“In the flesh,” she replied with a smile.

“You look… you look healthy.”

It was true. Her face, always characterized by a thinness that bordered on emaciation, looked more fleshed out. Her prominent cheekbones no longer anchored angular planes, but more softly rounded features.

“You look good,” he said.

“And you look like a guy who just took a serious hit to the head. Try to sit.”

Akane helped him up.

“Did you blow up the terminal?” he asked.

“Nah. Just a sonic weapon. Everyone will have a headache for a few hours, but we didn’t kill anyone.”

She didn’t sound particularly happy about that.

He laughed and shook his head. It hurt. “Some things never change,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it. Now, is this a rescue, or are you going to sell me to the highest bidder?”

“I should knock you over the head for that.”

He remained silent.

Suddenly, she leaned closer and brushed his lips with hers. He looked into her face and saw an expression he’d never seen before—hurt.

“Do you really mean that?” she asked. “Do you really think I don’t value everything you’ve done for me over the years? Do you think I don’t know that I’d be dead without you? Or enslaved in a slum brothel somewhere in Asia, with guys pissing on me to get off?” She held back a sob. “Maybe I deserve it after all. I haven’t exactly shown much appreciation, have I?”

Sked just chuckled.

“Yeah,” she continued, “I guess not. I have been a first-class bitch. I know. It’s just that…”

Even now, she couldn’t do it. He sighed. “It’s just that you were afraid to open up, that if you aren’t the meanest, baddest, craziest screwup in the room, you think no one will ever respect you. So you never believed it when people loved you for what you are.”

Akane turned away, and they rode for some minutes in silence. Sked tried to reconstruct the events at the airport as they went.

Suddenly, his memory tugged at him. “Do you know what happened to Cara?” he asked.

That was the wrong thing to say. Akane looked back at him once, and her features went hard again, blocking off the kinder, gentler version she’d allowed to emerge for air.

Sked cursed himself, but he also needed to know what had happened to the woman who’d actually helped him out without doing anything crazy.

“Cara went down,” the voice in his head said. “Don’t talk to Akane about it. We can discuss Cara later. And there’s a lot to discuss.”

He blinked twice. The Electric Buddha had never been shy about hijacking Sked’s implants, so he’d know Sked had gotten his message. He would grieve for Cara later, though. He promised himself that.

“Akane,” he said. “Thank you. And I’m sorry for having doubted you. You don’t deserve that.”

She nodded. Once. Curtly.

“So where are you taking me?”

“Gotham.”

“Gotham? Like in Batman? Or are you just calling New York that now?”

A small smile broke through the ice. “You’re going to love this part,” she said.

Then she refused to answer any more questions.

* * *

They pulled up in front of a strange building in Manhattan near the East River, a kind of olde-English style of apartment complex combining ornate brick structures with New York verticality.

“Just interdicted the cameras,” Akane said. “We have one minute.”

Sked, still a bit woozy, followed her out of the van and under the scaffolding around one of the buildings. The van pulled away to reveal a pocket-sized, tree-filled park behind them.

“What is this place?” he asked. “I know we’re in New York, but this doesn’t look like the Empire State Building.”

“This is Tudor City,” Akane said, “and it’s irrelevant. What matters is what’s underneath here.”

“Boilers and steam pipes, I would say. Maybe a Brooklyn-bound Subway.”

“You’ll see,” Akane said.

They climbed down the three steps of a service stair and approached a nondescript, grubby gray door. One of the guys from the van had come with them, and he opened the door with a perfectly normal key.

It swung open with a loud groan to reveal a grubby passage half-occluded by garbage cans.

“Fire hazard,” Sked said. “Nice.”

“It would be, if this were an exit from any of the buildings, but you’ll see.”

Navigating by the light of a single yellow incandescent bulb, they followed the corridor past a couple of boiler rooms and what appeared to be an old, unused trash furnace to a small gas meter at the end. It was covered with greasy grime, and you could hardly read the numbers.

Akane pulled on the meter, and the entire wall swung out, meter and all. It swung silently to reveal a light gray tunnel softly bathed in diffuse light. It was as clean as the earlier corridor had been dirty.

“I don’t think we’re in New York anymore, Toto,” Sked said.

Akane smirked. “Not in any New York you’ve ever imagined.”

The door closed behind them, and Sked suddenly realized the tunnel dead-ended ten feet ahead.

Until it started moving.

Down.

Down some more.

Down several minutes.

“We’re going to end up under the water table,” he remarked.

“Not here. This is pure Manhattan granite,” Akane replied. Then she shrugged. “Plus, there are like, these really big pumps.”

Sked just let the lift descend. He’d never suffered from claustrophobia, which was one of the reasons he was successful in his chosen line of work.

When the elevator finally hissed to a soft stop, the door opened to reveal a dimly lit area that seemed to spread out forever. The roof, fifteen feet above his head, was hung with cables and relays. Tiny lights—amber, red, green, blue—flickered on and off above them.

The air felt close and humid, as if the cavernous space was packed with people, and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Sked saw there were people everywhere. Sprawled on the floor, seated in recliners, on beds, and even just standing around, perfectly immobile.

Every single one of them was coding. Most had enormous computers wired to the cables above. Some worked with laptops jacked into racks. Those standing immobile were obviously using implants.

It was as if a college hacker dorm had spilled out into a football stadium. Or perhaps a better analogy would have been that the hackers invaded Carlsbad Cavern.

“How many?” was all he said.

“Permanently? Maybe twenty-five hundred. All told, I’d say four K,” Akane replied. “The Wayne isn’t very forthcoming on that.”

“Wayne? Batman again?”

“Yeah. They’re really into comics here.”

Sked rolled his eyes. He knew the type. These were the most dangerous people in the world, if your biggest fear was identity theft. But get them out of their little dungeons—or, as in this case, their enormous, unexpected, and high-tech dungeon—and they wilted.

But in their element…

The hacking power of the subterranean world around him was staggering. All of these people working together must truly rock the world.

“So what’s happening here? Cybersecurity? Cyberattacks? Anonymous?”

“A little of everything, but mostly just a hacker community.”

“What kind of hats?”

“All of them. The Wayne doesn’t judge.”

Sked whistled. “So everyone and his kid brother is pissed at the people in here?”

“Pretty much, but this is a haven. One of the conditions of being safe is you keep everyone else safe, too.”

Sked looked around. “This seems like way too many people to keep a secret. How come we don’t have every law enforcement agency picking this place apart?”

“Most of the people who come here agree not to leave for years,” Akane replied, “and the ones who do are pretty much under a kind of Omerta law. Talk about Gotham, and the powers-that-are will kill you and everyone you know. And the way it works is, you get to watch Mama Edith or sweetheart Ginny get tortured to death before you get your own little session with the hot knives and fishhooks.”

“Sounds like a wonderful place you’ve brought me to.”

“Would you rather have stayed at the airport?” When he didn’t reply, she snorted. “Thought so. Besides, you’re part of a package deal with the Buddha. You can come and go as you please, and people will trust you. Just don’t break that trust.”

“What now?”

“We talk to the Wayne.”

They threaded their way through the hackers, down a corridor with dozens of bathrooms and shower rooms leading off it, and across another chamber, equally large, but deserted. A glass door slid open, and they entered an office that looked like it had been carved out of black crystal. A tall, dark-skinned man sat behind it, reading something in a set of smart glasses. The lenses went clear as they approached.

“The famous Sked,” the man said. “I am honored to meet you in person.”

Sked shook the proffered hand. “Sorry for the way I look,” he said, “but I was involved in a multiple murder, then a flight down from orbit, and a large gunfight at the airport. I might not be at my best. Also, I was expecting you to be dressed like a bat.”

The Wayne chuckled. “Yeah, the whole naming thing was a drinking session that got out of hand. Funny story: the next day, I didn’t remember what we’d named the stuff, but everyone else did, so the names stuck.”

Any question Sked might have had about why they’d chosen New York, of all places, to hide what had to be the densest concentration of cybercrimes on the planet evaporated. The Wayne’s accent informed anyone with an ear for such things that he must have been born in Brooklyn.

“Well, I’m grateful for you taking me in,” Sked said.

“It’s very temporary,” the Wayne replied, “and exceptional. The amount of heat someone like you brings with him… I can give you a couple of days.”

“That’s more than enough. From here, I can disappear completely.”

“Good. We will appreciate that,” the Wayne replied. “Would an exit into the New York subway system help?”

“Like water in the desert,” Sked replied.

“Good. We’ve also got synthskin kits if you need them.”

Sked shuddered. He hated the feeling of the artificial flesh over his face, but he knew it would keep the ubiquitous surveillance cameras—every one of them hacked by someone or other—from giving him away. He sighed. “I guess,” he said, “and thanks.”

“You like our setup? I can’t offer you space right now, but when the storm blows over…”

Sked smiled. “I’ve always preferred to play alone, and to be out in the field when possible. Not sure either of those would work for your outfit.”

“We have a field operation. The guys who pulled you out of the airport, for example.”

“Yeah, noticed those.” Sked paused. He didn’t want to offend his host. “I’ll think about it.”

“Yeah, right. No hard feelings.”

“So why did you pull my nuts out of the vice?” Sked asked. “I doubt Akane convinced you to save me.”

“No. You were bought and paid for by someone with a little more clout.”

“The Buddha.”

“Since you already know, I suppose there’s no harm in admitting it. That electronic dude has a real strange sense of honor, for an upjumped hard drive.”

Sked laughed, feeling the tension leave his body now that he understood he was truly among friends, even if only circumstantial ones. “He probably needs me for another job. Maybe piss off the CIA this time.”

“I’d really prefer if you did that after you leave. Those guys can be a pain,” the Wayne said. Then his eyes darted to a spot just above Sked’s right shoulder. He was evidently receiving something through his smartglasses.

After a few moments, he turned his attention back to Sked.

“Apparently, there’s a delivery for you.”

“For me? No one knows I’m here. Hell, I didn’t know I was coming until I got here.”

“Nevertheless.”

A pale kid who didn’t look much older than sixteen entered the room, walked up to the Wayne, and held out a cardboard box the size of a baseball. The Wayne just nodded in Sked’s direction, and the kid gave Sked the box before walking out of the room.

Sked opened the lid and pulled out the content.

“Is that an eye?” the Wayne said.

“Yeah. Sort of,” Sked replied.

The eye was gray, and Sked knew it well. He’d looked into that eye less than a day ago as he made love to its owner.

So Cara was an android, he thought, and I bet I can guess which android, too. Out loud, all he said was, “It’s a hard drive.”

“And when will it be leaving these premises?”

“As soon as you can get me synthed up and show me to the subway station.”

“I’m coming with you,” Akane said, speaking for the first time since they’d entered.

“Out of the question,” the leader of Gotham replied. “The Electric Buddha told me to keep you safe.”

“And you did an excellent job,” she replied. “Now I’m going with him.”

“Akane,” Sked said, “I’m going to make a serious run for it, drop off the grid.”

She pulled away like he’d slapped her.

He knew what would happen now. She’d give him the cold shoulder until he left. Alone. And it would take her months to talk to him again.

She was about to turn away when, suddenly, she stopped, her expression strained, her mouth a thin cut.

Akane stared at him in silence for five seconds.

She started to speak. Stopped. Finally, “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want me to go with you.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“That’s not what I asked. Do you want me to go with you or not?”

Sked swallowed. There was nothing in the world he wanted more than to settle down with her and disappear off the grid. She was a total lunatic, but there was something… something about the way she opened up to him slightly more than she did with anyone else. Something about the way she let him hold her after sex… he couldn’t think of those things without feeling an ache deep in his chest.

“I want you to come, but maybe this isn’t the time.”

“It’s now or never, Sked.”

“Fuck,” he replied.

She grinned. The kind of kid-in-an-ice-cream-parlor smile she almost never displayed. “Then it’s settled. I’m coming with you.”

“Don’t you have to pack?” he said.

She showed him a backpack on her shoulder. “No way I’m letting you out of my sight, but nice try.”

She applied the synthskin to him, a pre-prepared mask that changed his features and was undetectable except under extremely close scrutiny. She suffered the same indignity herself.

Then another Gothamite, this one a young woman with one half of her head shaved, and the rest tinted in pink and white, led them out of the Wayne’s office and into a long corridor that dead ended a hundred yards away. She lifted a manhole cover with a crowbar that lay against the wall, and they climbed down into another tunnel.

Sked had expected a sewer or a claustrophobic cut in the granite.

He hadn’t expected a two-lane tunnel for cars, well-illuminated, and with immaculate pavement.

“The fuck is this?” Akane said.

“It’s an emergency tunnel for the UN building,” the woman replied. “They’ve got cameras, but we cut into them a long time ago. All they’ll get is a loop on empty.”

They walked gently uphill in the tunnel for what seemed like a quarter mile, maybe a little more, and came to a door with a numeric pad on it.

The woman punched in a four-digit code, and they entered. A staircase took them up and ended at another door. This one opened into a supply closet.

Mops and buckets were neatly stacked on shelves. The woman opened another door, this one unlocked, and peered out.

“You can go. Take these.”

She handed each of them a MetroCard and headed back to the first door.

They emerged onto a wide corridor with tiles on the wall. Signs told him they were at the 33rd Street Station of the 6 train.

He chuckled. “Well, this certainly makes things easier. We’ll take the uptown train one stop.”

They emerged in Grand Central Terminal. Even in the early morning, there were people in the enormous edifice, but no one seemed to be looking for them.

“Where now?” Akane said.

“There’s a post office on the street at that exit. It opened at 6:00 am, so I’m going to grab something out of a PO Box.”

“They open this early?”

“They do in the Grand Central Post Office. That’s why I chose this one.”

“And you carried the key with you? To Peru? And up to space?”

Sked nodded. “There are three keys I have with me at all times in case I need to make a run for it. This is one of them.”

The guard let them through, and Sked opened the box. He made a mental note to change the location of the stacks of papers now that Akane had had a chance to memorize the number on the box, and then, ignoring the sheafs of documents, he pulled a small white cardboard box from the depths.

“What’s that?” Akane asked.

“Pills,” he replied.

“What for? You dying of something and neglected to tell me?”

“I’m not dying.”

He zipped the box into a jacket pocket, closed the door of the box, and headed toward the post office exit. The guard peered at them a bit, but again, said nothing as they passed.

“Where now?”

“Penn Station.”

They went to Penn Station, where they took the New Jersey Transport train to Trenton. Once there, they transferred to the Amtrak local to Philadelphia. From there, another Amtrak train took them all the way to Tampa.

“This is probably the slowest trip I’ve ever taken,” Akane griped as they emerged into the Florida heat. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire Chinese Communist Party is here waiting to receive us, complete with marching bands and banners that say ‘Welcome to your execution party, Mr. Sked.’”

“They have no clue where we are. This crap on our faces will be enough to fool the cameras, and the tickets were bought through fresh cards and accounts. All we need to do now is avoid showing any ID. Oh, and buy a car.”

“Without ID?”

“This is Florida,” Sked replied. “Just watch.”

Two hours later, they were rolling north in a 1980s Ford Aerostar they’d acquired for the princely sum of $400.

“You got ripped off,” Akane said. “This thing isn’t going to make it.”

“You don’t know where we’re going,” Sked protested.

“Doesn’t matter. If we’re going farther than the corner, this thing isn’t going to make it.”

Sked sighed. “You’re full of cheer today, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t slept in two days.”

“You should have slept on the train.”

“Can’t. Too nervous. Everyone’s after us.”

“We have dropped off the grid. Relax.”

But Akane didn’t relax. She fidgeted all the way to their destination, a large wooden house in a tiny West Florida village called Lower Suwanee. He stuck a hand into a false rain gutter and retrieved a key taped there.

“Welcome to our new home,” he said. “You can peel that gunk off your face. There aren’t any cameras in here. Want me to carry you across the threshold?”

“Screw you.”

Inside, it was just a regular house: polished wooden floors, furniture, a TV in the living room, sofas covered in dust sheets. A stale, musty smell hit them when they entered. “We should open some windows,” Sked said.

“Sure, just let the commandos in,” Akane replied.

“Listen, will you relax? We’re good. Untraceable. Not even your friends in Gotham know where we are. I’ve had this safehouse reserved for five years. We’re good, I tell you.”

“I think you… holy shit. Is that what I think it is?”

“The quantum mainframe? Sure it is. But you don’t want to use that one; it’s isolated from the network, for special projects I don’t want online. Try the one in the study. And don’t connect using your real name, will you?”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “How did you even get one of these?”

“We used them on one of Cyrano’s projects. A straight-up brute-force hack in South Korea. That job was a bitch, but it netted his client so much money—from people who were in no position to complain to the authorities about it—that no one bothered to ask what became of the computers in the end. So here they are.”

“You can’t just buy these things.”

“I know,” Sked replied, “but I also know better than to ask where he got them, or to look a gift horse in the mouth. If you really want to know, you should ask Cyrano.”

“Can’t. He’s pissed at me.”

And suddenly the tension of the flight, the murder, the firefight, the escape—all of it hit, and he collapsed onto a sofa, laughing all the way down. “Is there anyone, anywhere, who isn’t pissed at you?”

She knelt beside the sofa and looked into his eyes. “I’m hoping it’s you.”

“Who are you, and what have you done with Akane?” he said.

She didn’t smile. “I’ve been thinking. A lot. And the math always comes out the same way. There’s one person who has always had my back. One person who’s saved me from myself more times than I can count.” She looked away for a second. “And I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Everything. I never appreciated what I have with you.”

Sked sighed. “Akane,” he said, “I know you feel guilty, but if you’re going to tell me you suddenly realized that you love me, you should know I don’t believe you. You’re not wired that way, and… well, every time you’ve softened even a little, I’ve ended up hurt.”

“Not this time.”

“We’ll see.”

“You will.” She leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek, which surprised him. He’d half-expected her to drag him to bed and prove just how committed she was. She’d done that before. “Now what about that eye?”

“Ugh. You’re right. I’m going to need to deal with this before I can get any rest.”

He got up with a groan and headed toward the quarantined computer. He’d had some experience with android eyes before, so he pulled the correct plug out of the drawer, a needle interface for biological systems, and pushed it into the black pupil.

“Wow, you can’t tell that’s there,” Akane said.

“Can I have a little privacy?” Sked asked.

She didn’t stalk away. She just nodded and left. He wondered who’d been talking to her.

He dumped the data from the eye into an open sandlot area with enormous memory and waited to see what the stuff inside could do.

He wasn’t disappointed; executables immediately began running, coopting computer systems, and within minutes, an avatar appeared on a secondary screen. An avatar of an attractive young woman with haunting gray eyes.

A slight burst of static emerged from the speakers while she calibrated. “Nice place you’ve given me,” the avatar said, “but I can’t help noticing there’s no internet connection.”

“Oops,” Sked replied with a smirk. “Sorry about that. It’s built to keep programs I don’t know if I can trust isolated. Should I call you Cara, or are you going to admit you’re the Pan Pipe Cryer?”

“So you figured that out?”

“Not too many androids doing serious wetwork, and of those, I only know one who takes the bodies of beautiful young women.” He thought for a moment. “And that’s why you saved me. The Buddha called in a favor.”

“The Buddha did nothing of the sort,” she replied. “I also honor my debts. More than the Buddha, even. Hell, I was alive once, too.”

“You uploaded?”

“Not by choice.”

“Oh. Well, I’m glad you made it out of the airport in one piece, even if the only piece that made it out was your eye.”

“I always have backup plans, and the Buddha told me how to reach you in Gotham.”

“So now what?” Sked asked.

“I assume you’re going to be lying low?”

“Obviously.”

“Good. I might want to join you,” the Cryer said.

“How?”

“I’ll ship myself a new body.”

He laughed. “That could make the domestic arrangements a little awkward.”

“Ah. The Akane woman.”

“Yes,” he replied, “the Akane woman.”

“Fair enough. Can you have the Buddha arrange for someone to pick me up?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

“It truly is my pleasure. I’m kinda attached to being alive, and I owe that to you.”

“The same could be said of me.”

Sked stood. “Well, enjoy the mainframe. I can’t let you connect, but it should be big enough to run whatever simulated universes you carry around with you for when you’re having these out-of-body experiences. There’s something I have to do.”

Sked unlocked the door that led out into the yard and, pushing aside waist-high weeds, walked to a rotting wooden pier that jutted into a canal.

“Are you listening?” he subvocalized.

“Yes,” the Buddha replied, as always, piggybacking on his implants.

“Did we get away clean?” he asked.

“Yes, and I went in and erased the few tracks you left, just in case. I see no sign of search activity directed to the path you took. You threw them completely.”

“I thought so. Sometimes the old ways are best.” Sked pulled the box out of his pocket. “I came out here to say goodbye to the voices in my head,” he said.

“You’re going to dissolve the implants?”

“Too many people know I’m implanted, and I’m on too many video feeds using these things. They’re going to come after me this way. And besides, I’ve been hearing rumors.”

“The Brazilian nanobiotics.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah. Flexible. Undetectable. Unhackable. Much faster than my bioware will ever be. I just need to steal it without anyone suspecting it was me.”

“It’s also untested. Years from the market. Risky.”

“So was this stuff when I stole it. Served me well, but it’s on the market now. My edge is gone.”

“Then I wish you good luck.”

“Goodbye, voice in my head.”

“We’ll speak again. Likely sooner than you think.”

“Sooner than I want is probably closer to the truth.”

Sked popped open the blister. It held two pills, one red and one yellow. He had to take them both, and his own body, boosted by the drugs, would dissolve the implants connected to the different parts of his nervous system.

“What are those. Are you dying?” Akane’s voice surprised him.

“Take a seat,” he said, “and no, I’m not dying.”

“Then what? Or won’t you tell me?”

He considered making up a story, but she seemed to have turned over a new leaf. Perhaps it was best to give her the benefit of the doubt. He swallowed the pills. “These drugs will help me to expel a set of hyper-advanced biological implants. Bioware computing much faster than commercial metal implants.”

Her eyes widened. “You’ve got implants? That’s suicidal.”

“Not these. These are undetectable. You can’t tell they’re in there with regular metal scanners. They’re plastic and ceramic and organic. It was always my unfair advantage.”

“Still hackable,” she replied.

“Yeah. And now a lot of people know I have them, so it’s time for them to go.”

They sat in silence for a while, watching insects zoom around the canal, creating ripples where they skimmed the water.

Finally, he spoke again. “And it’s time for Sked to die.”

“You’re going back to being Brown?”

“Nope. He’s burned, too. Why don’t you choose a name for me?”

She stayed quiet for a long time. Then she shook her head. “No. It’s too much. I’ve already done enough harm to you. All I can come up with are silly things like White Hat and Good Guy and Hero.”

He laughed. “You know I’m none of those things.”

“You always were, to me,” she replied.

He put his arm around her shoulder and pressed her close. “We’ll think of something,” Sked said.

He knew he should just stop. Knew he should enjoy his millions and see just how long Akane could go without holding up a bank or kidnapping a crime boss. He might have the chance to be happy out on this lonely piece of Florida backwater.

But in the back of his mind, a little voice—not a hacked implant this time, but part of his own mind—whispered about what marvels he could achieve if he got his hands on a usable chunk of that Brazilian nano. The Buddha must know someone who could implant it and…

Sked told the voice in his mind to shut up and watched the bugs fly to and fro.

He figured he’d earned at least one afternoon of bliss.

# # # # #

About the Author

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over four hundred stories published in fifteen countries, in seven languages.  He is a member of Codex and a Full Member of SFWA. He has published six science fiction novels including one trilogy, four monster books, a dark military fantasy and a thriller. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).

In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest.

His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com.

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The following is an

Excerpt from Book One of Blood and Armor:

Never Again

___________________

Bill Fawcett

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Excerpt from “Never Again:”

“Good thing we got word when we did,” Jaziri said. They both knew their Humvee was parked just out of sight down the road. The driver’s careful approach had saved them from driving, unsuited and unprepared, into the gun’s field of fire. He looked across the gorge. “They have another one setting up to guard that approach.”

“Important targets,” Nisti Khan replied. Her voice had steadied now that they were in contact with the enemy.

Moving fluidly and aided by the almost silent motors powering the limbs of the suits, the fighters edged around the flat space where the road widened before entering the bridge. They could see enemy sappers on the roadway atop the dam, dropping satchel charges into the water on the reservoir side of the dam. Each charge was suspended from a long cable, and there were dozens of the heavy cases being carried from the three helicopters by streams of Iranian soldiers. Jaziri wasn’t sure they had enough explosives set to destroy the sturdy dam, but he wasn’t about to let them try.

“The range is still pretty long for the third mullah chopper,” Khan noted, eyeing the machine on the far side of the gorge.

“I’ll get closer,” Jaziri said. “When I fire, you take out the two in front of us.”

Khan nodded, and as one of the cylindrical grenades popped out of her shoulder harness, she took it in her hand, ready to throw. Another of the explosive missiles ejected partially, ready for the second shot.

The raiders, probably special forces troops of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, projected an air of professional competence, no doubt honed slightly by the tension of their mission and the knowledge that they were committing sabotage deep inside a foreign country. A few NCOs barked commands here and there, while an officer or two stood beside each chopper, but by and large, the men proceeded as if they were well trained and confident. As the last of the charges were removed from the helicopters, technicians settled down on the bridge and hooked up the cables to a battery-powered detonator.

Jaziri cleared his faceplate to transparency and looked at the young woman beside him. She did the same, meeting his gaze with a frank appraisal of her own. He saw no fear in her expression—instead, she looked back at him with a thrilled, almost eager stir of anticipation. She, too, had been one of the twelve at Mahabad. She’d witnessed the deaths of Timo’s wife and son.

As if reading his thoughts, she whispered, “Never again.”

* * * * *

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The following is an

Excerpt from Book One of The Sergey Chronicles:

Ganwold’s Child

___________________

D.T. Read

Available now from Theogony Books

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Excerpt from “Ganwold’s Child:”

Darcie didn’t expect to live.

With the hand she could move enough to reach them, she tore unit and command patches from her uniform shirt, leaving only her nametag, rank, and combat surgeon’s insignia. She drew out the chain from around her neck, yanked off the two crystal pendants hanging with her ID tags, and shoved them into the corner behind her.

“Mama?” The child stirred on her lap, trying to push himself back. “Why are—”

She put a finger to his lips, her other hand cupping his head to keep it from bumping the metal bulkhead. “Hush, Tris.”

She could barely whisper. She sat on the bottom of a locker meant only for a pressure suit—one of four lockers in the maintenance compartment—with the toddler held snug between her body and her drawn-up knees.

Outside noises reached her, the roar of engines crescendoing toward thrust into lightskip. The fourth attempt.

She braced her head in the corner behind a pressure suit, hugged Tristan to her breast, and locked her teeth. Clumsy masuki! They won’t have a catch left if they strain the transport to disintegration first.

Lightskip warning horns screamed through the corridor outside the maintenance compartment. The vessel shook and groaned. In its turbulence, the child threw up.

Darcie swallowed against her own nausea at its sour odor. She wiped his mouth and the front of her uniform. “Don’t cry, little soldier,” she whispered. “Here now, hold onto me.”

The horns wound down as they had before, and she relaxed her brace against the melting sensation of entering lightskip.

She waited for what seemed like hours in stifling darkness. Her legs grew cramped, then numb from their position and the toddler’s weight on them. She tried to shift a little, to ease them, and pain arced up her back.

Her thoughts tumbled over each other without any order. She thought of Lujan, her husband, waiting for them at their destination, and remembered the way he’d kissed her good-bye months ago on Topawa.

The locker had grown hotter, almost suffocating, despite the vents in its door. She wondered, in an oddly detached way, how long it’d take for her and Tristan to suffocate. She couldn’t help wondering what Lujan would do when he learned they were dead.

The tremor of explosions shattered her reverie. Shooting? She heard the transport’s minimal weaponry reply, then running footfalls thudding up and down the corridor beyond her hiding place.

Another hour passed before the craft rocked from the impact of electromagnets attaching and shuddered with the whine of winch cables. She started at volleys of light arms’ fire and bootfalls ringing through the passages. Armored bootfalls this time, not scuffing masuk footsteps.

She caught her lower lip in her teeth and began to stroke the child’s hair.

The maintenance compartment’s door slammed open. Voices reached her—two or three of them, only meters away—but their words, modulated by their helmets’ electronics, weren’t understandable. Boots trod the circumference of the maintenance compartment. Over the sound of her pulse in her ears, she detected an oscillating hum.

She pressed a hand tight over Tristan’s mouth and bit off a groan. She’d used lifeform sensors before; the locker’s construction wouldn’t jam them.

The hum shot to a sharp whine, and the boots stopped outside her enclosure. She heard an order, then banging. Metal clashed on metal until she thought her head would split, and Tristan’s wail would be drowned in its clamor. When the locker door was torn away, she stared up at three armored shapes silhouetted against the dull light.

Dominion legionnaires.

The nearest one shoved aside the pressure suit, seized her by the wrist, and hauled her to her feet. She staggered, numb legs nearly buckling, and almost lost her hold on her child. From behind tinted helmet visors, the other two soldiers’ gazes roamed her body.

Darcie jerked her wrist from her captor’s gauntlet and wrapped both arms around Tristan. “This is illegal, you know. It’s been a month since the hostilities ended at Enach, and the talks are—”

“I don’t think so,” the squad leader said. “Where’ve you been for the last few years?”

She glared at him and forced herself not to let her breath catch when one soldier stooped to search the locker. He straightened and handed something to his sergeant. “Look at these.”

The crystal hologram pendants—their wedding portrait and a picture of Lujan with Tristan.

The sergeant held them up to the light, and she saw his eyes widen behind his visor. “Yeah, I thought the nametag looked familiar,” he said. “The colonel will probably promote us for this.” He tucked the holodiscs into his utility belt and reached for her arm. “It’s my duty to inform you, Lieutenant Dartmuth, that at no time in the last nine years has the Sector General recognized the governments of the Unified Worlds. He sealed the Accords under duress, so it wasn’t a legitimate treaty.”

She evaded his hand. “Nine years? Surely you can lie better…”

Her voice trailed off as she remembered the futile attempts to make lightskip. The masuk slavers must have succeeded at entering a time track whether or not they had crossed space. She questioned the legionnaire with a stare.

“The Enach Accords weren’t ratified as easily as the Unified Worlds had hoped,” he said. “They didn’t fail as completely as Sector General Renier had hoped, either. You may be able to make that up to him.”

“Mordan Renier?” Darcie stiffened. “Sector General?”

The squad leader smiled. “I wonder what kind of plea bargain the Unified Worlds might be willing to make in exchange for you?”

* * * * *

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The following is an

Excerpt from Book One of The Last Marines:

Gods of War

___________________

William S. Frisbee, Jr.

Available now from Theogony Books

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Excerpt from “Gods of War:”

“Yes, sir,” Mathison said. Sometimes it was worth arguing, sometimes it wasn’t. Stevenson wasn’t a butter bar. He was a veteran from a line infantry platoon that had made it through Critical Skills Operator School and earned his Raider pin. He was also on the short list for captain. Major Beckett might pin the railroad tracks on Stevenson’s collar before they left for space.

“Well, enough chatting,” Stevenson said, the smile in his voice grating on Mathison’s nerves. “Gotta go check our boys.”

“Yes, sir,” Mathison said, and later he would check on the men while the lieutenant rested. “Please keep your head down, sir. Don’t leave me in charge of this cluster fuck. I would be tempted to tell that company commander to go fuck a duck.”

“No, you won’t. You will do your job and take care of our Marines, but I’ll keep my head down,” Stevenson said. “Asian socialists aren’t good enough to kill me. It’s going to have to be some green alien bastard that kills me.”

“Yes, sir,” Mathison said as the lieutenant tapped on Jennings’ shoulder and pointed up. The lance corporal understood and cupped his hands together to boost the lieutenant out of the hole. He launched the lieutenant out of the hole and went back to digging as Mathison went back to looking at the spy eyes scrutinizing the distant jungle.

A shot rang out. On Mathison’s heads-up display, the icon for Lieutenant Stevenson flashed and went red, indicating death.

“You are now acting platoon commander,” Freya reported.

* * * * *

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The following is an

Excerpt from Book One of The Prince of Britannia Saga:

The Prince Awakens

___________________

Fred Hughes

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Excerpt from “The Prince Awakens:”

Sixth Fleet was in chaos. Fortunately, all the heavy units were deployed forward toward the attacking fleet and were directing all the defensive fire they had downrange at the enemy. More than thirteen thousand Swarm attack ships were bearing down on a fleet of twenty-six heavy escorts and the single monitor. The monitor crew had faith in their shields and guns, but could they survive against this many? They would soon find out.

Luckily, they didn’t have to face all the Swarm ships. Historically, Swarm forces engaged major threats first, then went after the escorts. Which was why the monitor had to be considered the biggest threat in the battle.

Then the Swarm forces deviated from their usual pattern. The Imperial plan was suddenly irrelevant as the Swarm attack ships divided into fifteen groups and attacked the escorts, which didn’t last long. When the last dreadnought died in a nuclear fireball, the Swarm attack ships turned and moved toward the next fleet in the column, Fourth Fleet, leaving the monitor behind.

The entire plan was in shambles. But, more importantly, the whole fleet was at risk of being defeated. The admiral’s only option now was to save as many as he could.

“Signal to the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Fleets. The monitors are to execute Withdrawal Plan Beta.”

The huge monitors had eight fleet tugs that were magnetically attached to the hull when not in use. Together, the eight tugs could get the monitors into hyperspace. However, this process took time, due to the time it took for the eight tugs to generate a warp field large enough to encompass the enormous ship. It could take up to an hour to accomplish, and they didn’t have an hour.

Plan Bravo would use six heavy cruisers to accomplish the same thing. The cruisers’ larger fusion engines meant the field could be generated within ten minutes, assuming no one was shooting at them. “The remaining fleet units will move to join First Fleet. Admiral Mason in First Fleet will take command of the combined force and deploy it for combat.”

The fleet admiral continued giving orders.

“I want Second Fleet to do the same, but I want heavy cruiser Squadron Twenty-Three to merge with First Fleet. Admiral Conyers, I want you to coordinate with the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Fleets. I want their monitors to perform a normal Alpha Withdrawal. As they’re preparing to do that, have their escorts combine into a single fleet. Figure out which admiral is senior and assign him local command to organize them.” He pointed at the single icon indicating the only ship left in Sixth Fleet. “Signal Prometheus to move at best speed to join First Fleet. That covers everything for now. I fear there’s not much we can do for Fourth Fleet.”

The icons were already moving on the tactical display as orders were transmitted and implemented.

“I’ve given the fleets in the planet’s orbit their orders, Admiral,” the chief of staff informed him. “The other fleets are on the move now. The Swarm should contact Fourth Fleet in approximately ten minutes. Based on their attack of Sixth Fleet, the battle will last about twenty minutes. With fifteen minutes for them to reorganize and travel to First Fleet, we’re looking at forty-five minutes to engagement with the Swarm.”

“What are the estimates on the rest of the fleets moving to join up with First?”

“Twenty minutes, Admiral. However, Prometheus is going to take at least forty-five and will arrive about the same time as the enemy.”

“Organize six heavies from Seventh Fleet and have them coordinate a rendezvous with Prometheus, earliest possible timing,” the admiral ordered. “Then execute a Beta jump. Unless the Swarm forces divert, they should have enough time. Then find out how many ships have the upgraded forty-millimeter rail gun systems and form them into a single force. O’Riley said that converting the guns to barrage fire was a simple program update. Brevet Commodore O’Riley will be in command of the newly created Task Force Twenty-Three. They are to form a wall of steel which the fleet will form behind. I am not sure if we can win this, but we need to bleed these bastards if we can’t. If they win, they’ll still have to make up those losses, and that will delay the next attack.”

* * * * *

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Find out more about Fred Hughes at: https://chriskennedypublishing.com.

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