"Mikey," he said after another sip, "we have a major league problem. You have put us people in a state of serious risk."

It was me he was p.i.s.sed at? I bogged a mo, then found my voice.

"Huh? Rewind. Rayno, what are you talking about?"

He looked down, took another sip of his caffix. "You know how Georgie's old man cracked OurNet?" he said, soft. "Hung a buffered line printer on his Honeywell-Bull. Echoed your CityNet online session direct to paper. Got a byte-for-byte copy of everything we did.

Gatekeeper pa.s.swords. Trojan horse addresses. Activity committments.

Everything."

I scowled too, and shook my head. "Oh Rayno, that's-that's pathetic. I mean, talk about style, total lack of."

Rayno looked at me, and his eyes were hot skewers. "You miss the point, Mikey. Who cares about style now? He's bagged us." He paused, touched his cup but didn't drink, then looked at me again. "You promised me this could never happen. You told me never in a million years could he crack the secures on OurNet. I believed you, Mikey. I53 trusted you."

Suddenly, my voice was a choked sputter. Rayno was being so unfair. I mean, how could he expect me to bulletproof us against something that dumb?

Rayno sighed, and gave me a sad smile. "Face it, Mikey, you porked up bigtime. Your a.s.s is dogfood now. Question is, what are you gonna do to protect the rest of us?" I was still trying to find an answer for that when he drained his caffix cup, sat up straight, and toggled to normal voice. "And now, you can do me a big favor and beat it." He leaned back in his seat, looked away, made it clear that the audience was over.

Just like that. I stood up, fighting for words. Rayno thought he could blow me off that easy? I felt the Starfire bulging in its pocket, and sudden I started to flush hot and mad. He thought he could just throw me away? I'd show him! He wouldn't be nowhere without me! I was equal, now! Spinning around, I clenched my fists and stomped straight out the door.

They were waiting for me out on the sidewalk. Two older guys with grim faces and dark business suits; the short, wide one studying a photograph, the big, man-mountain one keeping up a scan of the street. I recognized them immediate from a thousand vids: Gestapo. KGB. Brain Police.

"You Mikhail Arthur Harris?" the short one asked. The mountain started to move towards me.

"Who wants to know?" I said. The attempted snarl came out a nervous squeak.

"Are you Mikhail Arthur Harris?" Shorty asked again.

I faked left, broke right, started running. A third one stepped out of the shadows between two buildings and grabbed me. Man-mountain lumbered over to help Number 3 hold me while Shorty barked something into a walkie-talkie.

The big ugly green privatecar with the blackfilm windows came roaring up in a screech of tires and a cloud of stinky diesel smoke.

Shorty popped the back door open and dove inside; the other two pushed54 my head down and forced me into the car, while a Number 4 came jogging up the street from the other direction. Boy, they'd been prepped for me. I hardly had my face out of the upholstery before they had the plastic cablecuffs zipped tight and the doors slammed shut.

With another screech of rubber and blast of burning petrol, we were off and jouncing down the street. Hard left. A hard right, onto the expressway. The engine opened up with a throaty roar. Somewhere around the Crosstown ramp I finally fought through the icy terror and got my voice back. "Who the h.e.l.l are you guys? Where you taking me?

I got rights!"

Shorty, in the jumpseat, turned away from the window and looked at me cold and black. His voice was gravelly and murderous slow. "Sure, boy, you've got rights. Sometimes I lie awake nights and count them, just to make myself crazy."

I shut up, cringed, tried to slide down in the crack between the seat cushions. Five minutes later we whipped off the expressway and into the airport. The car ground to a stop in front of a private hangar. Shorty jumped out first and started directing things, while Man-mountain and Number 3 manhandled me out of the car and stuffed me into a private Lear with couple sour-faced old guys in dark green uniforms. Man- Mountain pinned me in a seat with a forearm across my chest until Number 3 had my seatbelt latched. Shorty said something into his walkie-talkie and slammed the hatch. The turbines lit up with a rising, piercing, nail-in-the-ear whine. We rolled forward for a bit in jerks and turns, then stopped.

Then acceleration like a big hand pushed me back deep into the seat foam.

An hour later, two hours later, I don't know: Too scared to try talking (not that the guys in the green uniforms were answering, anyway), flying through the night without a shadow of a word about who these guys were or where they were taking me, the noise of the engines like crazy dentist's nanorobots drilling into my ears, I finally fell into a nervous sleep. In my dream Dad was a fire-breathing cyborg55 dragon, and Mom kept politely asking him not to breath so much fire.

Georgie was there, blimping up and sprouting roots like an old potato, and Lisa was slowly peeling off her tatterblouse. But I never got to see what was underneath, 'cause just then Rayno came crashing through the front plate gla.s.s of Buddy's with a whole squad of blackshirt Lucasfilm cartoon n.a.z.is ...

Somehow, though, I could never quite figure out whether he was fighting them. Or leading them.56

Chapter 0/ 7.

I woke up with an earache and numb hands. The numb hands part I understood-soon's I tried to stretch and yawn, and felt the tight plastic cuffs biting into my soft, skinny wrists-but the other thing remained a puzzler. Earache? The little inference engine in my head did a quickie cold-boot: CONDITION: Eardrums hurt /because/ cabin pressure is rising /because/ plane is losing alt.i.tude /and/ plane is still in controlled flight THEREFORE: We're landing! I snapped full awake and pressed face against window, looking for landmarks. It was a murky pastel false dawn down there, and that made it hard to tell.

Meantime, the earache was getting fierce. I tried to swallow and pop my ears, but my mouth was too dry. Maybe I could ask the gestapo for a dixie of water? I scanned the two sitting up at the front of the cabin and scratched the idea. From the crisp, serious look of their dark green uniforms I guessed we weren't going to Computer Camp.

So where were we going? I got a dry swallow down and the earache backed off some, but I was still having trouble thinking clear. Cold, tired, thirsty: the Starfire in my inside pocket digging into my belly like a little plastic brick, my headchips seriously garbaged by that whole scene outside Buddy's. Just what the h.e.l.l had happened?

My hypothesis generator kicked into high gear and started to spin out rough scenarios in my mind. Game #1: Rayno Turns Rat. He was p.i.s.sed at me, yeah, that was it. Rayno was seriously p.i.s.sed at me, and wanted to burn me truly bad, all because of old man Hansen's dumb stunt with the Honeywell. But Rayno was scared of me, too, 'cause he57 knew how good I was, so he'd gone straight to preemptive nuclear. The meeting at Buddy's was all just a ploy, a smokescreen so I'd be looking the other way when he set me up for- For who? Nah, didn't click; cooperating with authority-any authority-wasn't Rayno's style. Granted, he had motivation, and the circ.u.mstantials were there. But if Rayno'd wanted to teach me a lesson, he would've done something with a little more cla.s.s, right?

Right?

The more I processed, the more that unanswered last question made my stomach churn. So I scratched the first scenario and popped the next one off my stack. Game #2: Paranoia. What if I was even better than I thought? What if, pure accidental, my hacking around CityNet had stirred up some real heavy attention -say, FBI, CIA, or the Cult of Cthulhu or something? And now I was being disappeared to a secret Army gulag where they were going to surgically remove my brain? And I was going to spend the rest of my life as a mess of loose eyeb.a.l.l.s and brain tissue floating around in a big gla.s.s vat?

Oh, cool! I got a great twist in the gut from this one, 'cause it was so neat and total Krueger awful, but then the reality dampers slammed down. Come on, Mikey, the government? Get serious. We're talking about people who couldn't even find the Libyan Hacker Spies, and they had an office listed in the Washington D.C. phone directory. No way the government cybercops could've figured out what I was doing, much less caught me doing it. Unless, of course, Georgie's old man...

I looked around the plane again, scanned the n.a.z.is in the flat hats and green sportcoats. Nah, didn't checksum. What I'd done was break CityNet rules. CityNet Admin would have sent city cops to pick me up, and they would have kept me in town. Whoever was controlling this game was into serious overkill.

Which logical chained to, Game #3: Dad's Revenge. Okay, the uniforms were rented. The lear was a Fuji-DynaRand company jet. This was all some overblown scam Dad had cooked up; they were going to fly me around for a while and scare the bejeezus out of me, then land58 right back where we started, and I'd be so relieved to be back I'd kiss the ground and be the loyal and grateful son of House Harris forevermore. Yeah, this was the sort of thing Dad would cook up. I decided I might even let him think it'd worked, for a while.

Then a nervous voice in the back of my heads.p.a.ce started nagging me, saying, "What if you're wrong? What if this is really Game #4: Dad Finally Pulls the Plug On Mikey?"

I argued the voice down. I mean, Dad couldn't really be that p.i.s.sed, could he? I'd backed up all his files. It wasn't like I'd truly hurt him or nothing. Pressing nose against window again, I tried one more time to get a confirm on where I was.

Bad news. My hometown is built in a valley. There's a river, flows right through the middle of it.

The place we were landing was built on a bay.

When the spinning in my head slowed up, I started to whip together a program. Okay, somebody-didn't matter who, I could verify the who part later-somebody had made me the site of a soon-to-be major-league dump. This had me upset some and scared a lot, but most of all it made me mad. I was gonna have to set up some maximum heavy duty revenge, once I got out of this mess. Once I got out, I'd...

But first, I needed to crash the program in a truly bad way.

After processing some, I decided the best path was to a.s.sume that everything I saw from here on was true/true. If it turned out this was some kind of mindgame Dad was playing with me, it'd still be worth crashing out. I flashed for a mo on how Dad would squirm and sweat while he was trying to explain to Mom how he'd lost her baby in some strange city, and let out half a smile. Little Mikey Harris was declaring war, and it made him feel a lot better.

So, next step? Orientation. I looked out the window again, tried to make a best guess at where we were landing. The light was getting better; the bay, I flagged, was more long and narrow that it'd looked at first. It opened out to the sea at the far right end. We banked around for a59 turn, and I saw snowcapped mountains off in the distance.

For a nano I flashed on the time Martin'd shown me a geography database some company was using to demo an artificial stupidity program, and I wished I'd bothered to pirate it like he'd asked me to.

This was the exact sort of thing it was designed for. If only I had it in my Starfire and my hands weren't cuffed, I could-but never mind, I didn't and they were, so I couldn't.

Still, I have some pretty fair smarts in my unaugmented head. This was a rudimentary adventure problem, right?

The sun was rising behind us. It wasn't easy with the cuffs on, but I checked my watch. An0/ 8:17:40/ sunrise, in June? Okay, we were three hours behind my hometown, which put us somewhere on the west coast.

We were landing at a seaport on a long, narrow bay, near some snowy mountains, on the west coast. Nowhere came to mind immediate, so I started to commit some serious brains to the problem. As we banked around for our final approach I spotted SEATTLE painted on the roof of a bowling alley and that saved me a lot of work.

Okay, next step was to spec out an escape routine. My first idea was to wait until they took me inside the terminal building, then kick someone in the kneecap and start shouting, "Help! They're gonna make me a h.o.m.o!" Gay bashing was a popular team sport again, so with any luck at all my keepers'd be so busy fighting off the Real Men they wouldn't be able to hang onto me. I'd wriggle away clean, zip over to a McRefuge, tell 'em I was an abused runaway. Tell 'em my old man liked to b.u.t.ter my buns, tell 'em these guys were part of a nationwide ring of ...

No good. I'd wind up doing three months' observation in the Social Disease lockup, and if I lived through that they'd hand me over to some bleedyheart social worker. I'd almost rather give in to Dad.

I popped the next idea off the stack. Seattle's a big town. It was sure to have a CityNet, and a cyberpunk scene. I was zeroed out for cash or plastic, but I did have my Starfire. If I could get loose for two minutes and find an open node-somewhere in this airport there had to be an60 open node-I could jack in, make some local contacts, and burn in a new set of friends fast. One of them'd reroute a smartcab for me; I'd get out of the airport and get lost in the city, totally. Then, when I was sure I'd shaken off the gestapo, I'd log onto NationNet and zap a fax to Rayno. Rayno'd know what to do. He'd figure out a way to get me home.

a.s.suming, of course, that he wasn't the one who'd put me here in the first place. If I was wrong, and we really were running some variation on Game Scenario #1...

I decided to block this part of the plan to another folder and rethink it some more later.

Once I'd reduced the algorithm to Escape!, everything else was sudden hardwired clear. Geez, it was sharp and simple! I kicked it over a few more times, and each time it looked more and more like a truly great plan. Escape! Find a node. Jack into the local cyberpunk scene. Go underground. Maybe I could even hang around Seattle a few extra weeks, to get Mom real p.i.s.sed at Dad. I started to feel truly derzky, thinking about all the great tricks and treats I'd show my new Seattle friends. If I played this right I could be NetMaster to a whole city of cyberpunks! I was feeling so derzky I could hardly stand it!

Trouble was, there was just one little bug in the program. It was all hanging on the hope that my keepers would give me a chance.

Soon as we landed, we taxied over to a great big green quonset hangar a good half mile from the terminal building. With a little skritch of brakes we jerked to a stop alongside a creaky old wreck of a propengined airbus, and then the turbines whined down to silence and my keepers were up and moving. Grim, wordless, one grabbed hold of my collar and upper arm and pinned me rigid, while the other one reached across and popped my seatbelt latch. Then, like I weighed almost nothing at all, the guy on my arm hoisted me rough to my feet, while someone outside the plane unsealed the hatch and cracked the lock. The hatch opened with a slow, lazy, gas-strut kind of hiss.

The gestapos pinned my arms to my sides, dragged me out of the61 lear, and marched me straight up the boarding ramp at the nose of the prop plane. There was a guy waiting for us at the top of the ramp; he looked like a cross between a small tank and a real ugly pit bull, and even ten feet away he smelled like a river of sweat. Short, muscle-tight, his face a gritty hash of old acne scars-in other words, a cla.s.sic secondary symptoms roidal, an old steroid addict- Correction: An old ex-addict. There's no such as an old active roidal.

I looked at this guy at the top of the ramp, and my heart hit my shoes and I just about gagged. I'd met his kind plenty of times before, both on video and in the a.n.a.log. Ever since third grade they'd been warning us about them. The roidals who don't die fighting to compensate for their microp.e.n.i.ses wind up as public school gym teachers, usual, checking out the teenage boys in the locker room and looking for new deltoids to pump up. That's how roidals reproduce, I'm told.

The human vise holding my left arm turned to the Incredible Living Steroid and said, "Thanks for waiting."

"No problems," Roidan the Flying Monster growled in answer. "I'd rather hold the plane than get 'em after you've been sitting on 'em for a week."

"The parents contracted for an off-the-street grab," the vise on my right said. "This one's still pretty disoriented."

"I prefer 'em that way."

Wrong, bozo, I wasn't disoriented, I was in Total Shock mode.

Parents? You mean like both parents?

"Here's his suitcase," a third gestapo-probably the pilot of the lear-added, as he came up the ramp and threw Mom's old green tourister through the hatch. "And here's his paperwork." He handed over a thick brown envelope. Roidan looked down as he took the envelope, and for just a mo a little snicker ran across his face. "What's so funny?"

the gestapo on my right asked.

"Look at his shoes," Captain Steroid whispered. The gestapo looked at my blitz yellow hightops and started to smirk, but then Roidan cleared62 his throat and the gestapo snapped to rigid attention.

Satisfied that no one was having a good time, the roidal pulled some papers out of the brown envelope and, for surprisers, started reading. (I half expected him to just chew them up.) While he was looking over the paperwork I took a good long minute to look him over. Then I sc.r.a.pped every last hope I had of breaking loose in Seattle.

The guys on the lear had looked sour and hard. The Incredible Living Steroid was short-about two inches taller'n me, which is short for an Older, but another typical secondary symptom-and total toughlooking.

Shaved head. No neck I could see. Shoulders just crawly with muscles. Muscles that bulged and popped when he nodded his head; muscles that stood out angular when he tried to form any other expression on his angry red face. Each one of his biceps was about as big around as my waist.

As the image bits clicked in and the total picture formed, I flagged he was wearing a different uniform, too, from the guys on the lear: Green suede 'n' goretex boots, and a camo jumpsuit with big sweat stains around the armpits and the name Payne black-stenciled on a green strip over his right breast pocket. Another minute of watching him read, and I decided he had the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled up. All those tattoos made it hard to tell.

Oh, great. They were throwing me on a plane with Attila the Scout Troop Leader. Just fritzing great.

"Harris?" he said soft, not looking up. Tiny beads of sweat sparkled on his tan, nubbly scalp. I didn't answer. Maybe I couldn't fight what was happening right at the mo, but I was d.a.m.ned and determined not to cooperate with it.

"Harris?" he asked again.

"Whadayawant?" I said, in my best sullen punkspeak.

"You will address me as sir," he said, looking up at last.

"Sir Payne?" I said, sarcastic to the max.

"Oh," he said gentle, "so we're a smarta.s.s, are we?"

"Well, sir -- "63 "DID I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO SPEAK?" Spit flew when he bellowed, and his face turned three shades of darker red. My sullen routine was blown away, of course. By the time I got the cringe out of my neck I didn't know whether to answer, shake my head, keep silent, or just c.r.a.p in my pants.

Payne tucked my papers under his left arm, started cracking his knuckles and making experimental fists, and looked my face over like he was trying to pick the exact best spot to hit me. Then he gave me a look that said I was the most disgusting thing he'd ever smelled in his entire life, and growled, "Get inside. Sit down. Shut up." The gestapo on my left popped the cablecuffs off, and the one on the right turned me loose with a shove. Payne helped me into the plane with his boot. While I was picking myself up from off my suitcase, all three gestapos from the lear skittered down the ramp, and Payne lifted the ramp and pulled it inside.

With one hand.

Inside the plane it was dark, but after a few seconds my eyes started to adjust and I began picking out faces. Good, at least I wasn't going into this alone. There were thirty-five, maybe forty other people in the cabin; as my eyes adjusted even better I started to flag they were all guys about my age, and none of them were there by choice, either. 'Cause, well...

Row One: We had a stringy-haired chemhead sitting next to a fossil gearhead greaser, across the aisle from two McPunks in standard-issue electric blue mohawks. Row Two: Three vidiots gone Tommy (deaf, dumb, and blind) with their earcorks in, videoshades on, and beltclip vidplayers going, next to a comikaze with his nose buried in a DynaBook. (The guy who figured out how to make half-animated comic book ROMs play on standard school DynaBooks must have made a fortune.) Row Three: One very squeamly looking Style Statement wimp with perfect hair, surrounded by a bunch of horse-maned slammers in studs and black leather. Row Four: Two Little Hitlers exchanging hot glares with two b.u.t.thole Skinheads, because the Hitlers had only jackboots on64 their feet and swastikas tattooed on their foreheads, while the b.u.t.tholes had genuine Doc Marten "Clydesdale" boots and little blue totenkopf tattoos they'd carved in themselves. Row Five ...

Get the idea? Put that mix on the transys and you get Instant Gang Fight. But here on the plane they were all sitting quiet, hands in their laps, looking so depressed I wondered if the chemhead was treating everyone to megahits of Blotter Suicide. Even the McPunks were quiet (hard to believe, I know). One hugged his boombox like it was a baby doll; the other did a little furtive tapping on the drumpads of his Casio keyboard. But what made it weird was their gear was turned off. Not just down; off. I started working up the nerve to open a commline and then felt hot breath on the back of my neck.

"Move back!" Payne yelled, giving me a friendly kick to indicate direction. "Find a seat!" he added, giving me a cheerful kick to indicate what I should put in the seat when I found it. I picked up Mom's green tourister suitcase and started stumbling down the aisle. About the sixth row, it hit me. Cold and sudden, I knew why the punks and flakes were observing a truce. I knew soon's I saw the haircuts.

Or rather, soon's I saw all those white scalps showing through all those flattops.

The back half of the plane was packed with smiling, nauseatingly confident young guys dressed in camo. Camo shirts, camo pants, camo jackets-I bet they had camo underwear. From the feet sticking out in the aisle I could see they had camo boots. There I was, standing at the front of their section in my blue spatterzag jumpsuit, blitz yellow hightop tennies, and horsemane hair, feeling like a fatal error flag, and they all just looked at me.

Then one of them started to giggle. Then another, and another, and just about the time I was starting to really wonder what was so G.o.d d.a.m.ned Funny one of them finally spoke to me. He drawled, "Hey boy, where'd y'all get them shoes?"

For a long minute I wished I could just melt and ooze out through the floor. But the last couple empty seats were in their section, so I65 finally gritted my teeth, picked up my suitcase, and started walking.

Soon as I started moving again my shoes must have turned invisible, 'cause all the jarheads very deliberately Didn't Look at me. They went back to whatever it was they were doing, and I got down the aisle without too much trouble. But the c.r.a.p about my shoes had me burning, so I just kept staring at their heads. Flattops. Geez, every single one of them had the fritzin' Lance Stallone cut! I was stuck on a plane with a bunch of kids who'd not only seen Managua Blood, they'd identified with that pathetic slab of revisionist history!

Just back of the wing there was an open seat on my left, next to a freckled kid with a semi-friendly expression on his face and the name "D.K. Luger" stenciled on his shirt. I wrestled my suitcase up to the baggage rack, wedged it in between all the camo duffel bags, flopped into the seat. The freckled kid scanned me over a few seconds, then offered a handshake and drawled, "Hi, I'm -- "

"Don't talk to him, Deke," someone behind us hissed. "He's an Involuntary." D.K. Luger got embara.s.sed, pulled his hand back, and turned to look out the window.

"Aw, c'mon Deke," I said. (Actual, I whined it, just like Georgie.) "Ten hours ago my olders crashed me and stuck me on a lear. Okay, so I'm an Involuntary. Can you cancel that for a nano and-"

"Cryminelly," the kid behind us grumbled. "We got us'ns a cyberpunk."

I cancelled the hot retort and tried again in Ultra CleanSpeak.