Do I have any choice?

Before she could think about it any further, paralyze herself with indecision, Sly aborted the other utilities she had running. The mirror image, the heat lightning, even the suit of plate mail-all vanished. With a growl of triumph, the two golems converged on her.

The construct of the attack program appeared in her hands. A bulbous, s.p.a.ce-opera laser rifle. She swung the barrel up, pointed it at the nearest golem. It was c.u.mbersome. clumsy, incredibly difficult to aim. (Sly knew that, in reality, her meat body was slumped on a couch in the back room of a cavern, her fingers flying across the keys of her cyberdeck. The clumsiness of the laser rifle represented the difficulty she was having in tailoring the code of a virus program, tweaking it so it'd crash the code of the intrusion countermeasures that were trying to coopt control of her deck. But, like any decker, she'd buried that reality deep. It was so much faster, much more efficient, to think symbolically. But also much more terrifying.) She squeezed the rifle's trigger. With a loud pah of discharging capacitors, the weapon fired. A yellow-white bolt of energy burst from the muzzle, slammed into the torso of the nearest golem, punching a hole clean through it the size of Sly's fist. The thing staggered back, howling. She squeezed the trigger again.

Nothing. The weapon had a recycle time-representing the time it took to modify the code for another a.s.sault on the ice. The high-pitched whine of recharging filled her ears.

The golem was hurt-maybe seriously-but it wasn't going to back off. It lunged at her again while its comrade shambled to the side, trying to flank her.

The laser rifle beeped, and she triggered it again. The bolt took the attacking golem clean in its lack of face, tearing the head from its neck. The ma.s.sive body collapsed to the ground, flickered, then vanished.

The second golem snarled, leaped at her. She couldn't move, couldn't do anything while the rifle recycled. A black fist slammed into the side of her head, smashing her to the ground. Her scream of pain seemed unimaginably distant in her own ears. The world blurred around her.

Through the crushing pain, she heard a beep. For an instant didn't realize its significance. Then, just as the golem swung another blow-a killing blow, this time- she squeezed the trigger.

The energy bolt plowed into the monster's belly, knocking it backward. It screamed its agony, flailing wildly at the hole torn in its torso.

But it didn't go down.

Crumpled on the floor, the rifle-useless until it recharged-in her hands. Sly watched death approach. Looming three meters above her, the golem snarled down at her. Enjoying itself. Slowly raised a foot high, ready to slam it down and crush her skull.

Too slowly. The rifle beeped. Sly clamped down on the trigger.

The energy bolt ripped upward into the construct at a steep angle. Blasted into its groin, tearing up through its torso, exiting from the back of its neck. It teetered there for a moment, then toppled toward her. Pixelated and vanished an instant before it struck her.

Sly just lay there, gasping. The laser rifle felt crushingly heavy in her hands-meaning that the programming effort of keeping the utility code running was becoming too much. She let it deactivate, saw the construct flicker and disintegrate.

I did it. . . . The metabolic poisons of fear and exhaustion were flowing through her body, making her muscles feel leaden, and giving her a sick headache. With an Olympian effort, she forced herself to her feet. Looked around her. The office was empty.

But maybe not for long. She had to get out of here now.

She took a moment to run a medic program, to restore at least some of the damage the ice had inflicted on her persona programs. She ran the construct-a complex science-fictional "scanner"-over her body, felt at least a portion of her energy returning. Some of the damage she'd suffered had been real, she knew, affecting her meat body directly-surges in blood pressure had probably burst capillaries, strained heart valves. But she also knew that those things would heal with time.

Which, of course, she didn't have now. She had to get out of this node-somehow-relocate back to the satlink. But how?

She started to initiate an a.n.a.lyze utility-hosed it the first time, had to try again. The utility's construct appeared as a pair of goggles, which she slipped over her icon's eyes. She started to scan the walls of the "office."

There it was, what she knew she had to find. A concealed "door," a rectangle of wall that shimmered when viewed through the goggles-a dataline leading out of this node. Another utility told her there was no security on the "door"-nothing to stop her from using it-but couldn't tell her what was on the other side. Apparently, there was some kind of discontinuity that blocked the utility's scan.

That was rea.s.suring. She'd certainly experienced a discontinuity when she'd been shunted here. If she was lucky, this dataline would lead her back to the satlink. She took a deep breath, readied herself. And plunged through the doorway.

A moment of blackness, of vertigo and disorientation. And then the virtual reality reestablished itself around her.

Luck was with her. She was back at the satlink node. Actually within the construct this time. The blue structural elements formed a lattice around her. The beads of ice still shuttled up and down along the elements. Fear twisted her belly for an instant, but then she realized they weren't paying any attention whatsoever to her icon. Why should they? she reasoned. I'm inside now; they're looking for intruders coming from outside.

She looked around. The lattice-work parabolic dish of the satlink was above her, pointing up into the sky. When viewing the construct from without, she hadn't seen anything extending from the dish, anything that could have been the dataline to Zurich-Orbital. Now, from her new vantage point, she couldn't miss it. A faint, shimmering tube of sky-blue light, lancing into the heavens.

Z-O, here I come, she thought, then plunged into the dataline.

There was something . . . not right . . . about how Sly felt as she sped up the dataline. Some sense of . . . disconnection, though that didn't quite describe it either. At first she thought it was a mental artifact, some kind of aftereffect of her combat with Jurgensen, with the golems. But then she realized it had to be the time delay that T. S. had mentioned. Depending on the geometry of the link-the number of sidelinks necessary to communicate with the Zurich-Orbital habitat-the light-speed lag could be three-quarters of a second, an eternity at computer speeds. She tried to imagine what it would be like without the compensator chip that T. S. said was installed in the deck, then gave up; this disconnected feeling was disturbing enough.

She'd expected there to be something distinctive about the system access node leading into the Zurich-Orbital system-something that reflected its importance. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just another SAN, following the Universal Matrix Specification standards, appearing as a simple door in a shining silver wall.

Sly stopped outside the SAN, ran a selection of a.n.a.lyze programs on it. As she expected, the door was a glacier-almost solid ice. Nothing lethal that the utilities could detect, but enough barrier and trace ice to overload a less powerful node.

Nothing that Mary Windsong's slick utilities-backed by the punch of Theresa Smeland's deck-couldn't sleaze their way past. The ice accepted Sly's forged pa.s.scodes, and the door swung open. She slipped silently into the heart of the Zurich-Orbital computer system.

Through an SPU-a sub-processor unit-and into a CPU. Probably one of many, she guessed. Most modern systems were "ma.s.sively parallel"-the term currently in vogue-with multiple CPUs, sharing the processing overhead of the system. Cloaked, so that any ice or deckers in the CPU wouldn't spot her, she called up a system map.

Then, with stunning clarity she realized she'd reached her destination. She didn't have to go any further. There was a public bulletin board system-well, "public" with respect to people who had access to the Corporate Court's computer-to which all multinational corporations contributed. It comprised a single datastore connected to a dedicated SPU-which was, in turn, linked with the subordinate CPU where Sly was. All she had to do was upload Louis' stolen datafile from her cyberdeck to the CPU. Order the CPU to transfer it to the SPU, along with an instruction to post it in a read-only section of the datastore. Simple.

Too simple, part of her mind yammered. But no. It took just a couple of clock ticks to write the appropriate code, to feed it into the CPU's command stack. She watched an execution trace of the CPU's activity, saw her command get processed normally. Saw the creation of the data packets containing the paydata plus the appropriate instructions to the SPU, A few cycles later, she ran a listing of new postings on the BBS and saw the still-encrypted data appear, with file attributes of readonly and PROTECTED.

It would still be possible, but incredibly difficult, for someone to delete the file. The subordinate CPU where Sly was had the ability to post entries to the BBS data-store. But it didn't have the authority to delete a posting or even change its attributes or status. If somebody wanted to do that, they'd have to penetrate a lot deeper into the Zurich-Orbital system.

How difficult would that be? To find out, Sly ordered the subordinate CPU to display the security ratings of the nodes surrounding the central CPU cl.u.s.ter. Reading the lines of data, she had to suppress a shudder. Not a chance, she told herself. Any decker even thinking about penetrating the central CPU cl.u.s.ter might as well just shoot himself in the head. The result would be no less certain, and it'd probably hurt less.

I can't believe it. I'm out from under. . . .

It still didn't seem real. Maybe it wouldn't for a long time-maybe not until she'd returned to Seattle and saw everything was back to normal. But did she want to go back to Seattle?

She shook her head. Here in the middle of the Corporate Court's computer system wasn't the time or the place to worry about it. She reviewed things in her mind. Had she forgotten anything?

Satisfied that she had not, Sly jacked out.

32.

0613 hours, November 16, 2053 It was like a bad case of deja vu, Falcon thought. Sly jacking in, doing . . . something. And then all h.e.l.l breaking loose around her, with him afraid to jack her out before she was ready. Afraid not to jack her out, because the woman-plus-cyberdeck combination-tied to the wall, to the phone jack, and from there to the Matrix-limited their options so much. He didn't understand what she was doing, not really. And the not understanding made it all worse.

There'd been no real warning. Everything had been quiet, with Mary squatting on the floor next to Sly, watching her carefully. At first Falcon had thought that's all it was-just watching. But then he'd kind of . . . opened up his perception-that was the best way he could think of it. Opened himself up to additional data, data that wasn't coming in through his normal senses. Kind of the way he'd been opened to the alternate reality of the plane of the totems. And then he'd understood that Mary, too, was using senses other than the five normal ones to monitor Sly and how her body was reacting.

Twice he'd seen Sly twitch. The first time like somebody had touched her unexpectedly. The second time like somebody had goosed her hard-or like she was on some kind of drug trip gone bad. He'd wanted to jack her out right there, free her from whatever it was that was tormenting her. He'd turned to Mary, worried, questioning her with his eyes.

But Mary shook her head. "She's hurting," the shaman said. "Hurting bad, maybe. But it's not critical yet." He'd wanted to yell at her, to say any hurting was critical after the abuse Sly had suffered from the black box in that small concrete room. But Mary just looked at him calmly. "This is important, right?" she said. And all he could do was nod.

And it was then the gunfire started. The booming of single-shot weapons, the harsh ripping of autofire. m.u.f.fled by the closed door, but obviously coming from the barroom of the tavern.

"What the frag is that!" Falcon demanded.

Mary hadn't answered at once, just rested her shoulder against the couch, closed her eyes, let her chin sink down onto her chest. He wanted to shake her, then realized that she'd gone astral-the same way he'd gone astral to find and rescue Sly. Falcon wanted to join her, but he didn't know how. Not by himself, not without the help of Wolf. He tried to summon up the song he'd heard in the forest on that distant plane. He was able to remember it, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't feel it vibrating through him like before, was unable to sing along with it.

Mary came back almost immediately, opening her eyes again, flowing to her feet. He knew at once from her expression that it was something bad.

"There's heavy drek going down in the barroom," she told him tersely. "Some new guys came in-strangers; none of the regulars knew them. They headed for the back room. Cahill"-that was the bartender, Falcon recalled-"tried to stop them. They shot him.

"There were five regulars out front-drinking their breakfast here like they usually do-and four strangers. There's a real pitched battle going on. Two strangers down, three regulars."

"What the frag do we do?" Falcon demanded. He looked around the room. The only door led out into the barroom-into the firefight. At first he'd liked the security that represented; n.o.body could come in from the street or through some alley door without the bartender spotting them and giving some kind of warning. Now he realized the single door turned the back room into a trap. No way out in an emergency. "Can't you do something?"

She hesitated, then nodded. "You watch Sly," she told him.

"What are you going to do?"

"Summon a spirit," she said, her voice as calm as if she was saying, "Get a drink."

"I'll summon a hearth spirit."

"How?"

She grimaced. "You want me to do it or talk about doing it?"

"Go."

Falcon squatted down beside Sly, reached out and rested a hand on her forehead. The runner's skin was cool, but not cold. There didn't seem to be any tension in her body-as if whatever it was that had made her twitch was over. He didn't know whether to take that as a good or a bad sign.

Mary walked to the center of the room, already humming a calm, unhurried song under her breath. She began to move rhythmically in some kind of jerky dance, singing all the while. He watched her with his eyes, tried to extend his new, unfamiliar senses as well.

To his meat eyes, nothing seemed to be happening. But with those strange, arcane senses he'd never known he had, it was obvious that something was going down. He could feel a flow of energy, initially from Mary herself, but then shifting so that the flow came from outside-apparently from the structure of the building and from the ground on which it was built. It formed a swirling vortex around her, totally undetectable by the normal five senses, but obvious to his heightened perception.

Mary's song changed, took on words-words that weren't English or Cityspeak, but that he could somehow understand. "Guardian of hearth and home," she was singing, "protector from the elements, protect us now. Go forth now, great one, shelter your children." She pointed to the door.

The vortex changed, drew itself together into something almost humanoid in shape. Still invisible, still unheard, but still easily a.s.sensed. And the shape walked through the closed door into the barroom.

Mary stopped her song, let her shoulders drop. Wiped a sheen of sweat off her forehead with the back of a small hand. "That'll help for the moment," she said quietly, "but there are more strangers coming. And they've got their own shaman with them."

"So what the frag do we do?" Falcon had his machine pistol out, was nervously flicking the safety off and back on again.

"Bail out, that's the smart thing," the young woman told him.

"But how? Out through there!" He pointed to the door to the barroom.

Mary didn't answer him directly, just crossed to the back of the room. Ran her hands over the wall. Falcon couldn't see exactly what she was doing, but a section of the seemingly solid wall swung open-a small concealed door leading into darkness.

"Where does that go?"

"Into the storeroom," she answered, "then there's another door out into the back alley."

She gestured to the other door. "Let them chew each other up. We just bail."

He hesitated, looking at Sly. The decker seemed totally at peace, like she was asleep-or dead. He felt a moment of panic until he saw her breast rising and falling in a slow, relaxed rhythm. "No," he said at last. "I've got to let Sly have her shot. I owe her that."

"Even if it kills us?"

He didn't answer-couldn't answer.

"What if someone comes in the other way?" Mary pressed. "The door to the alley isn't hidden. They could try and flank us."

At last Falcon saw something he could do. He flicked the safety off his machine pistol one last time, made sure it was c.o.c.ked. "You stay here," he instructed. "Watch Sly. Don't jack her out until she's done. You hear me?"

"What are you going to do?"

He shrugged. "Watch our backs. And anything else I can figure out." Before she had a chance to argue, Falcon had ducked through the small concealed door. "And close this after me," he added.

The storeroom was small and dark, cold and smelling of stale beer. Stacked against two walls were wooden cases-no doubt containing bottles of liquor-and metal kegs. There were two doors, opposite each other. One led to the barroom; the other, latched and barred, had to lead to the alley. The concealed door swung shut behind him, and he heard a lock click. He turned to see how well concealed it actually was, feeling rea.s.sured that not the slightest clue of its existence was visible.

He listened at the locked door, the one to the alley. Nothing. But did that mean anything except that the door was too thick for him to hear surrept.i.tious movement outside? He hesitated, wishing for the ability to go astral like he'd done before. He tried to conjure up the sensations he'd felt on the plane of the totems and later, the oneness with the song of Wolf. It wouldn't come.

Well, waiting around wasn't going to help anyone. He snapped open the latches, raised the bar. Listened again- still nothing. Opened the door, and ducked back into the shelter of the wall. Again nothing-no grenade rolled and bounced into the storeroom, no high-velocity bullets st.i.tched the darkness. Crouching low he stepped into the alley, pulled the door shut behind him.

As far as he could see and hear, the alley was empty. Nothing moved near him. n.o.body pumped lead into his body.

Which way? Left or right? The Buffalo Jump was on the north side of the street, near the east end of the block. Which meant the nearest street was to the right. If he ducked around that end of the block, he was taking a real risk of running into the support that Mary had said was converging on the front of the tavern. He headed to the left, moving fast.

He could hear gunfire splitting the night. More than just the minor firefight that Mary had said was raging in the front of the tavern. This was more autofire, punctuated by the resonating booms that he'd come to a.s.sociate with grenades. A real fragging urban war was going on somewhere. What the frag was happening? Was it like the ambush at the docks, where Modal had said multiple teams-all corp, the elf had guessed-were sc.r.a.pping it out? It made an ugly kind of sense. Sly kept talking about the prelude to a corp war. Had it started, and already spread to Cheyenne? Frag, why not? Everything else is . . . what was Modal's word? Fugazi!

He ran on, crouched low, machine pistol held out before him, steadied by both hands.

Something was there! He felt the movement before he saw it. Above him, on one of the rooftops. He flung himself aside.

The crash of a powerful rifle shot, hideously loud. A round slammed into the wall next to him. Exploded violently. Fragments of ferrocrete lashed his bare face and hands. One splinter tore into the skin just above his right eye, temporarily blinding him with pain and blood. He brought his pistol up.

Falcon could see the sniper, a blacker silhouette against the black of the sky. The figure stood on top of a singlestory building near the west end of the block. A faint blue glow, something electric. A sniper-scope-light amplification. The sniper was working the bolt on his rifle, jacking another round into the chamber. Bringing the rifle back into line.

Yelling with fear, Falcon clamped down on the trigger. The machine pistol chattered, bucking in his hands.

He saw the bullets striking sparks from the parapet in front of the sniper. Heard a double cough of agony, as multiple impacts drove the air from the gunner's lungs. The silhouette swayed, dropped. Something fell from the rooftop, to crash and bounce on the alley floor. The rifle!

He sprinted forward, scooped up the huge weapon. Flattened himself against the wall directly below the sniper's position. Maybe he's only wounded, Falcon thought. Maybe he's got a sidearm as well. ... He looked up, wiping blood from his right eye.

It took a few seconds for his vision to adapt. Then he saw something hanging over the parapet. An arm. Something warm dripped onto his upturned face.

Blood. Not his own.

The sniper was down. If not dead, then incapacitated. For the moment.

Falcon looked at the rifle in his hands. A ma.s.sive weapon, bolt action, with a magazine three times the thickness of the one-now empty-that fitted his machine pistol. The barrel was long and thick, with some kind of Strange porting arrangement at the end. A muzzle brake. He stuck his finger into the muzzle, which was still hot from the pa.s.sage of the bullet. The bore of the gun was wider than his finger. What did that make it? A fifty-caliber? What the frag kind of rifle was fifty-cal?

Then Falcon remembered something else Modal had said after the dockside ambush. Something about a Barret sniper rifle, wasn't that it? Nineteen-eighties vintage? If this was the same gun-and how many of those could there be on the streets?-didn't it mean it was the same corp team as the one that had hosed Knife-Edge's ambush? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. . . . He'd heard that somewhere. But could he believe in that now?

No! Everybody was an enemy.