The small beads that were the intrusion countermeasures programs changed their pattern of movement, speeding up so that they became blurs. The mirror spheres drifted closer.

And gradually, the ice beads slowed down, resumed their regular slow motion. Sly felt a strange tightness in her shoulders, knew that the muscles of her meat body were rigid with stress.

The masking utility seemed to have worked; the ice beads showed no unusual activity whatsoever. Side by side, the two icons moved closer to the system construct behind the screen of mirror spheres. Still nothing. They were close enough to reach out and touch the midnight-blue construct.

"Ready?" Smeland asked. And then she grunted, "Uh-oh."

Before Sly could respond, the ice beads picked up their pace again, flashing back and forth along the structural members of the construct. Faster and faster they moved. An electronic whine rose in pitch and intensity, climbing the frequency spectrum, driving into Sly's ears like an icepick.

A dozen of the ice beads burst free from the construct, hurtled toward the two deckers.

Sly didn't even have time to scream before they struck.

16.

0717 hours, November 14, 2053 Falcon was bored.

At first the concept of watching two deckers at work had fascinated him. Like everybody who'd ever watched the trideo, he knew something about the Matrix, but had never hung with anyone who dived brain-first into it for biz. He'd imagined it would be exciting, tense, with the dedicated decker hunched over her deck, while her friends kept nervous watch, wishing they could help but knowing they were unable to do so.

At least, that was the way it looked on the trid. But of course, on the trid there was always the tense soundtrack, the fast-paced camera cuts back and forth between the decker's sweating face and the anxious expressions of her chummers.

In real life, without the cinematic tricks, it was just two women tapping away at keyboards. About as exciting as watching people in a word-processing pool, the ganger quickly decided.

Well, maybe not quite that bad. Now and again one of the women would grunt or mutter something to herself or to each other. Falcon wasn't quite sure which. But an electrifying high-energy media extravaganza it wasn't.

Modal seemed to have the right idea about how to handle things. The thin elf was slumped bonelessly in a chair, one leg dangling over the chair's arm, fast asleep.

That's what I should be doing, Falcon told himself. He was exhausted; his muscles ached, his skin was sore, and his eyes felt gritty.

How long since I've slept? he wondered. Not that long actually. He'd crashed out at Doc Dicer's body shop, waking up at around twenty-one hundred hours the previous night. That meant he'd only been awake for-he checked his watch-a little more than nine hours.

A very busy nine hours, of course, which went at least some distance in explaining why he felt so drek-kicked.

He looked back at the two deckers. How long was this going to take?

Suddenly, shockingly, the two women jerked violently as though they'd been poked in the solar plexus. Sly fell back in her chair, mouth hanging open. Her eyes were half-open, but rolled so far back that Falcon could see nothing but the whites.

Smeland slumped over to the side, the thick carpet cushioning her deck as it slipped to the floor. The woman moved sluggishly. Her eyes were open, too, but definitely not focusing. Her mouth was working, and she was making garbled "whurr" noises.

So fast that Falcon didn't even see him move. Modal was beside Sly's chair, cradling her head gently in his hands. Falcon jumped from the couch, knelt beside Smeland.

The decker was starting to return to some semblance of consciousness. Her eyes were rolling wildly, but Falcon could tell she was at least trying to focus. No such attempts at control from Sly. She was out-dead?

Smeland covered her face with her hands, rubbed at her eyes. Then, with an obvious effort, she forced herself back to a sitting position. She looked like h.e.l.l, Falcon thought, face pale and sheened with sweat, eyes bloodshot, chest heaving.

"What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l happened?" Modal demanded. His voice crackled with tension.

"Ishe," Smeland mumbled. Then, making a concerted attempt to articulate more clearly, she repeated, "Ice. Gray or black, I don't know. We got dumped." She pulled the deck's plug from her datajack, with a metallic snick that made Falcon's skin crawl.

The ganger saw Modal peel back one of Sly's eyelids with a thumb. "She's not dumped," he snapped.

"Huh?" Smeland was trying to push herself to her feet, wasn't making it. Falcon offered her an arm. She took it, steadied herself. "Not dumped?"

"That's what I said. She's acting like she's still jacked in."

Smeland walked unsteadily over to Sly, looked into her face then down at the deck. "That's not possible," she muttered.

"Well it's b.l.o.o.d.y happening, isn't it?" Modal grated. He reached for the optical fiber lead socketed into Sly's datajack. "Shall I jack her out?"

"Wait a tick," Smeland said sharply. She punched a few commands into Sly's cyberdeck, examined the display. Falcon looked over her shoulder, but the scrolling digits and symbols meant nothing him.

They obviously meant something to Smeland, though, and just as obviously she didn't like it. She frowned, chewed on her lower lip.

"Shall I jack her out?" Modal repeated.

"No!" Smeland grabbed his wrist to reinforce her words.

"Why not?"

"She's in a biofeedback loop with the deck," Smeland explained. Her voice had a quiver to it that Falcon hadn't heard before.

"So it's black ice that's got her," Modal said. "Then I should jack her out."

"No," Smeland repeated. "Normally, yes. But not now. It's the biofeedback that's keeping her alive," she explained. "The ice-or whatever it is we hit-shut down her heartbeat and her breathing. And now it's the only thing keeping her alive."

Modal shook his head. "I don't understand."

"It's like she's hooked up to a respirator in a hospital," Smeland said. "Jacking her out is like unplugging the respirator. She'll die."

"Then what do we do?" Falcon demanded.

"Nothing." Smeland's voice was flat, almost emotionless. "Anything we try will just kill her. Whatever did this, it has to be doing it for a reason. When it's finished, maybe it'll let her go."

"And if it doesn't?"

Smeland's only answer to Modal's question was a shrug.

Just fragging great, Falcon thought, looking down into Sly's face. Her eyes were still half-open, the lids quivering. Pale skin was tightly stretched over her high cheekbones. She looked half-dead.

There was a sound from outside-a screech of brakes. Inhumanly fast, Modal was at the window, looking down into the street. "Oh, frag," he muttered.

Falcon joined him at the window. A large car had pulled up behind the stolen Dynamit. It disgorged several large figures-large figures bearing large weapons. Four of them, two trolls, two humans. And probably another four around back. Falcon thought, if this was the attack it looked like.

"T.S.," Modal said urgently, "how good's your security?"

Smeland looked up from Sly's deck. "Good enough to stop a small army," she answered. "Why?"

"I just hope that's going to be enough," Falcon said quietly.

17.

0719 hours, November 14, 2053 Fear wrenched a scream from Sly's lungs as the ice beads struck. But the scream sounded strange to her ears, as if it hadn't happened anywhere but in her own head. The Matrix faded around her, leaving her in darkness. There was a wrenching pain in her chest, a terrible feeling of chilling numbness from her body. No! she screamed inwardly. Not again.

A moment of disorientation, as though she were tumbling wildly through s.p.a.ce. She was still surrounded by darkness-no, not darkness, nothingness-and her other senses also seemed to have failed her. No sensations came from her body; the pain in her chest was gone as if it had never been, and she couldn't hear or feel her heartbeat or her breathing. For an immeasurable time she tumbled through the void. Or maybe she wasn't tumbling; maybe it was just her brain-starved of sensations-feeding her false stimuli to fill the nothingness.

I can jack out. . . . She tried to break the connection between her and cybers.p.a.ce. But nothing changed.

Panic coursed through her. I can't jack out! And then a chilling thought bubbled up from the deep recesses of her mind.

You can't jack out from death. . . .

And then, as suddenly as it had vanished, sight returned.

At first, she thought that somehow she was outside the Matrix, magically transported, perhaps, to an environment that was, in its very familiarity, disturbing. Chilling.

She was standing in an executive office. Rich, neutral-tone carpet on the floor, sourceless lighting illuminating objets d'art on the windowless walls. The room was dominated by a large desk of dark wood, clear except for a pen and pencil set and what looked like a clock-calculator. Behind it was a comfortable-looking leather chair. It was the kind of office that might be found on the upper floors of any corporate or government edifice, anywhere on the continent-or in the world, for that matter.

The office door had to be behind her. Sly turned. No door.

And it was then Sly realized the true nature of where she was. As her point of view had moved, reality around her had broken down-momentarily, almost subliminally-into individual pixels, picture elements, revealing itself as only an illusion of reality. Only when she stopped, when she looked straight at something-the wall, an abstract painting, whatever-did it appear solid.

But not quite. Now that she knew what to look for, she could spot the individual pixels that made up every element of her environment. The resolution was incredible, much better than anything she'd ever seen in cybers.p.a.ce, but it was all a program construct of some kind. Which meant she was still in the Matrix.

But how? This wasn't the way things were supposed to work. When you got hit by black ice, you beat it in cybercombat, or you got dumped out of cybers.p.a.ce back into the "real" world. Or you got killed. That was the way of things, the nature of black ice. Somehow, however, she'd found herself in a fourth option.

Was T.S. here, too? In an a.n.a.log of this place? Or was Smeland dumped, possibly flatlined?

Just what the frag was going on?

She heard a sound, like that of a man clearing his throat, but with the flat, anechoic tone that told her the "sound" had been injected directly into her sensorium through her datajack. She turned back to the desk.

The high-backed swivel chair was no longer empty. Sitting there was a man of medium height, with short-cropped gray hair and icy gray eyes. For a moment she tried to guess his age, confused by the conflicting clues of his hair color and the absence of wrinkles around his eyes, then gave up the effort as meaningless.

He isn't real, she recognized, noticing that the resolution in this portion of the Matrix, incredible though it might be, wasn't quite up to defining individual hairs on the man's head. Another construct. A decker's icon.

She remembered the time and effort she'd put into "sculpting" her own icon when she was a working decker. Remembered the programming effort and the computing horsepower required to animate a construct with a resolution orders of magnitude worse than what she was looking at now. This kind of animation took huge amounts of programming and processing resources. Where am I? she thought desperately.

The man-the construct, Sly had to remind herself- regarded her steadily. He seemed to be waiting for her to start the conversation. But she wouldn't oblige him.

Finally he nodded and said, "You are Sharon Louise Young." His voice was strong, the voice of a young man. But, she had to remind herself, since nothing here was actually "real," that didn't tell her anything she could depend on.

Again the man waited."That's me," Sly said at last.

"And you are . . .?"

"Jurgensen, Thor. Lieutenant, CSF, UCAS Armed Forces." He smiled ironically. "I think we can dispense with the serial number."

UCAS Armed Forces. Sly remembered the ma.s.sive constructs beyond the horizon of cybers.p.a.ce, the data fortresses larger than the largest mountains. She felt as if a chill wind was blowing right through her.

"CSF, what's that?" she asked, although she thought she already knew.

"Cybers.p.a.ce Special Forces," Jurgensen answered, confirming her guess. He leaned forward, intertwined the fingers of both hands on the desk in front of him. "You have some information, Ms. Young," he said quietly. "We would like you to hand it over to us."

"What information?"

Jurgensen shook his head. "Don't insult my intelligence," he said. "I a.s.sure you I don't underestimate yours. You know exactly what I mean. The datafile you . . . acquired from Yamatetsu Seattle. The datafile describing the corporation's research into the interception and manipulation of fiber-optic data transmission. The 'lost tech,' to use the common argot. We know you have it. We also know that various other . . . um, factions . . . have tried to relieve you of it."

"So now it's your turn, is that it?"

The decker construct chuckled dryly. "If you like," he conceded with a shrug. "There's a difference, though. My colleagues and I wish to give you the chance to voluntarily hand the information over to us."

"Why should I?" Sly demanded.

Jurgensen shrugged. "Various reasons," he answered calmly, then began ticking off points on his fingers. "One, enlightened self-interest. Who could protect you from the other factions better than the military?

"Two, bringing the megacorporations back under the control of the civilian government. You've worked for and against the zaibatsus, Ms. Young. You know how far they can go, how much they can get away with, without the slightest fear of governmental action. With the information you acquired, we can . . . um, bring the megacorporations to heel, to some extent, at least, and return to the electorate some semblance of control of their own lives.

"And three, patriotism." Jurgensen grimaced wryly. "I know, it's an outmoded term, an unfashionable concept. But it's still worth considering. Countries on this continent and around the world are in compet.i.tion-for resources, for markets. They compete through trade controls and tariffs, through technological and industrial efficiency, and through more . . . obscure . . . means. Though n.o.body would expect you to buy into the old fallacy of 'my country, right or wrong,' we do hope, Ms. Young, that you'll consider the personal advantages of being a citizen of a compet.i.tively successful country."

"That's it?" she asked after a moment. "That's your pitch?"

"That's it," Jurgensen confirmed. "Consider it, please."

"Now?"

The lieutenant spread his hands, palms up. "Why not?" he asked reasonably. "I can guarantee you won't be interrupted or disturbed."

In other words, you're not going to let me go until you get what you want. "I don't have what you want with me," she told the military decker.

Jurgensen shrugged. "Tell me where in the Matrix it is," he said. "I'll send a smart frame to get it."

A smart frame-a semi-autonomous program construct. That told her they weren't going to let her out of here, even if she gave them what they wanted.

So what? she suddenly asked herself. Maybe Jurgensen was right. He made a reasonable case for an alternative she hadn't really examined before. If I can't destroy the data, and if I can't make sure everyone gets it simultaneously, I can always choose the best person to give it to-the lesser of all available evils. Minimize the disruption, the danger.

And then depend on the faction I choose to protect me from the rest.